Development of Biological Warfare Sensors Using High Performance Computer Systems

The Optical Physics Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory conducts research to develop advanced Biological Warfare (BW) detection capabilities for the real-time autonomous classification of individual aerosol particles. This paper describes the porting of their MATLAB design code running on a non-networked collection of PC Window computers to code that runs under OCTAVE (an Open Source software package that allows a user to run MATLAB programs) on a collection of processors on a high performance computing system. The new code offers the potential for reducing the turnaround time for a single run from 40 hours to 35 minutes.