A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2003, GAO designated federal real property as a high-risk area. In 2007, GAO reported that real-property-holding agencies and the administration had made progress toward managing their real property, but underlying problems, such as backlogs in repair and maintenance, still existed and six agencies reported having over $1 billion in repair and maintenance backlogs. Owning real property creates a fiscal exposure for the government from the expectation that agencies will incur future maintenance and operations costs. GAO was asked to (1) describe how six agencies estimate their repair and maintenance backlogs, (2) determine how these agencies manage their backlogs and the expected future changes in these backlogs, and (3) identify how backlogs have affected operations at some sites. GAO reviewed agency documents, interviewed officials, and visited two sites at each of the six agencies."

The 5.8% COLA payable in January 2009 was triggered by the rise in the CPI-W from the third quarter of 2007 to the third quarter of 2008. This COLA triggers identical percentage increases in Supplemental Security Income (SSI), veterans' pensions, and railroad retirement benefits, and causes other changes in the Social Security program. Although COLAs under the federal Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and the federal military retirement program are not triggered by the Social Security COLA, these programs use the same measuring period and formula for computing their COLAs. Their recipients will also receive a 5.8% COLA in January 2009.

Cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for the Civil Service Retirement System (CSRS) and the Federal Employees Retirement System (FERS) are based on the rate of inflation as measured by the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W). All CSRS retirees and survivors receive COLAs. Under FERS, however, non-disabled retirees under age 62 do not receive COLAs. This report discusses cost-of-living adjustments for government retirees, as well as related legislation.

The poloidal field (PF) coil system on ITER, which provides both feedforward and feedback control of plasma position, shape, and current, is a critical element for achieving mission performance. Analysis of PF capabilities has focused on the 15 MA Q = 10 scenario with a 300-500 s flattop burn phase. The operating space available for the 15 MA ELMy H-mode plasma discharges in ITER and upgrades to the PF coils or associated systems to establish confidence that ITER mission objectives can be reached have been identified. Time dependent self-consistent free-boundary calculations were performed to examine the impact of plasma variability, discharge programming, and plasma disturbances. Based on these calculations a new reference scenario was developed based upon a large bore initial plasma, early divertor transition, low level heating in L-mode, and a late H-mode onset. Equilibrium analyses for this scenario indicate that the original PF coil limitations do not allow low li (<0.8) operation or lower flux states, and the flattop burn durations were predicted to be less than the desired 400 s. This finding motivates the expansion of the operating space, considering several upgrade options to the PF coils. Analysis was also carried out to examine the feedback current …

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The 331 Life Sciences Laboratory Drain Field (LSLDF) septic system waste site consists of a diversion chamber, two septic tanks, a distribution box, and a drain field. This septic system was designed to receive sanitary waste water, from animal studies conducted in the 331-A and 331-B Buildings, for discharge into the soil column. However, field observations and testing suggest the 331 LSLDF septic system did not receive any discharges. In accordance with this evaluation, the confirmatory sampling results support a reclassification of the 331 LSLDF waste site to No Action. This site does not have a deep zone or other condition that would warrant an institutional control in accordance with the 300-FF-2 ROD under the industrial land use scenario.

Many of the important challenges facing humanity, including developing alternative sources of energy and improving heath, are being addressed by advances that demand the improved understanding and control of matter. While the visualization, exploration, and manipulation of macroscopic matter have long been technological goals, scientific developments in the twentieth century have focused attention on understanding matter on the atomic scale through the underlying framework of quantum mechanics. Of special interest is matter that consists of natural or artificial nanoscale building blocks defined either by atomic structural arrangements or by electron or spin formations created by collective correlation effects. The essence of the challenge to the scientific community has been expressed in five grand challenges for directing matter and energy recently formulated by the Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. These challenges focus on increasing our understanding of, and ultimately control of, matter at the level of atoms, electrons. and spins, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. Meeting these challenges will require new tools that extend our reach into regions of higher spatial, temporal, and energy resolution. Since the fundamental interaction that holds matter together is of electromagnetic origin, it is intuitively clear that electromagnetic radiation is the critical tool in the study …

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The overall objective of this research project was to develop an innovative modeling technique to adequately model the offshore/onshore transport of pollutants. The variable-grid modeling approach that was developed alleviates many of the shortcomings of the traditionally used nested regular-grid modeling approach, in particular related to biases near boundaries and the excessive computational requirements when using nested grids. The Gulf of Mexico region contiguous to the Houston-Galveston area and southern Louisiana was chosen as a test bed for the variable-grid modeling approach. In addition to the onshore high pollution emissions from various sources in those areas, emissions from on-shore and off-shore oil and gas exploration and production are additional sources of air pollution. We identified case studies for which to perform meteorological and air quality model simulations. Our approach included developing and evaluating the meteorological, emissions, and chemistry-transport modeling components for the variable-grid applications, with special focus on the geographic areas where the finest grid resolution was used. We evaluated the performance of two atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) schemes, and identified the best-performing scheme for simulating mesoscale circulations for different grid resolutions. Use of a newly developed surface data assimilation scheme resulted in improved meteorological model simulations. We also successfully …

We are witnessing a dramatic change in computer architecture due to the multicore paradigm shift, as every electronic device from cell phones to supercomputers confronts parallelism of unprecedented scale. To fully unleash the potential of these systems, the HPC community must develop multicore specific-optimization methodologies for important scientific computations. In this work, we examine sparse matrix-vector multiply (SpMV) - one of the most heavily used kernels in scientific computing - across a broad spectrum of multicore designs. Our experimental platform includes the homogeneous AMD quad-core, AMD dual-core, and Intel quad-core designs, the heterogeneous STI Cell, as well as one of the first scientific studies of the highly multithreaded Sun Victoria Falls (a Niagara2 SMP). We present several optimization strategies especially effective for the multicore environment, and demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to existing state-of-the-art serial and parallel SpMV implementations. Additionally, we present key insights into the architectural trade-offs of leading multicore design strategies, in the context of demanding memory-bound numerical algorithms.

This report is divided into two segments. The first segment provides the most recent developments on, and selected provisions of, the Continuing Appropriations Resolution, 2009. The second segment focuses on the (1) history and recent trends, including the nature, scope, and duration of continuing resoutions (CRs) during the past 35 years; (2) CR types by duration; (3) major substantive legislative provisions included in some CRs; and (4) funding gaps.

This report provides a general discussion of veterans' benefits issues that are part of the legislative agenda of the 110th Congress or are likely to be of legislative interest. Among those issues are disability compensation and pensions; education benefits; homelessness; life insurance; the status or eligibility of groups such as U.S. merchant seamen and World War II Filipino veterans for veterans' benefits; Reserve and National Guard eligibility for veterans' benefits; the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims; and legal representation for veterans. For each issue, an overview is provided, along with summaries of pertinent pending legislation. In addition, an overview of the benefits and their eligibility requirements, demographics for both the veteran population and the benefit population, and summary data on the FY2008 budget for veterans' benefits are provided.

This report is intended to discuss the geographic impact of base closures and realignments; summarize federal economic assistance programs for communities and individuals affected by military base closures and realignments (BRAC); and highlight issues for Congress.

This report provides an overview of the current status, trends, and forecasts for U.S. international trade. The purpose of this report is to provide current data and brief explanations for the various types of trade flows, particularly U.S. exports, along with a short discussion of particular trends and points of contention related to trade policy.

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This report discusses the responsibilities of the AOC, traces the statutory evolution of the office, summarizes the status of current and recent projects, and reviews selected issues before the 110th congress.

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This report summarizes salient points of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) actions regarding the creation of a public-private partnership to build and manage a national communications network for public safety use.

Perchlorate is the explosive component of solid rocket fuel, fireworks, road flares, and other products and is used heavily by the Department of Defense (DOD) and other industries. Perchlorate also occurs naturally. This compound has been detected in drinking water supplies, especially in California. It also has been found in milk and many foods. Because of this widespread occurrence, concern over the potential health risks of perchlorate exposure has increased, and some states and Member of Congress have urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set a drinking water standard for perchlorate. This report reviews perchlorate water contamination issues and developments.