Newsgroups: comp.parallel.pvm
From: bode@hubris.jpl.nasa.gov (Andy Boden)
Subject: Announcement: MPRL Software Available
Keywords: image processing, parallel processing, deconvolution, HST
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory -- California Institute of Technology
Date: 24 Jun 1996 15:03:57 GMT
Message-ID: <4qmaot$647@elroy.jpl.nasa.gov>


                   Announcing the Public Release 
         of the Massively Parallel Richardson-Lucy (MPRL) 
                         Software Package


  Researchers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Space
Telescope Science Institute (STScI) announce the public availability
of the software package Massively Parallel Richardson-Lucy, or MPRL,
in prerelease V0.5.  The MPRL program is designed to perform
spatially-variant point-spread function (SV-PSF) maximum-likelihood
image restoration for astronomical images.  MPRL performs SV-PSF image
restorations in parallel across a network of Unix workstations so as
to dramatically decrease the time required to perform such
restorations.  The code is freely available to all US researchers from
a distribution site at JPL.

Background:

  Since the discovery of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Primary
Mirror (PM) fabrication flaw and the attendant spherical aberration,
there has been significant interest in developing image restoration
techniques that could effectively cope with the spatially variant
nature of the HST PSF.  The SV-PSF problem is computationally
difficult, and to date has been tractable only with specialized
computer systems.  In 1994 researchers from JPL and STScI were awarded
support from NASA's Applied Information Systems Research program to
develop computational techniques that could effectively and
efficiently restore HST imagery by utilizing a SV-PSF model.  MPRL
addresses the SV-PSF restoration problem by exploiting the large
amount of concurrency available in such restoration computations.
This concurrency is realized not on special purpose computing
hardware, but on a network of popular Unix workstations using the
public-domain Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) communication library
available from Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

To Obtain More Information and Copy of MPRL:

  Interested users are directed to the World Wide Web URL
http://huey.jpl.nasa.gov/mprl.  Here you will find a more complete
description of the MPRL package, its capabilities, and instructions
for obtaining a copy of the software.

-----

  The development of MPRL has been carried out at the Jet Propulsion
Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, and the Space
Telescope Science Institute, Association of Universities for Research
in Astronomy, with support from the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration.



-- 


"...it doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter
how smart you are -- if it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

						- R.P. Feynman

