Lab teams recognized with Secretary of Energy’s Honor Awards

The Secretary's Honor Achievement Awards recognized four LLNL teams for their achievements.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) employees participating in four project teams were recently recognized with Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary’s Honor Awards.
"The dedicated teams that we are honoring today are uniting to build solutions, to ensure that every American has access to affordable clean power, to expand the limits of discovery, to bring new clean tech to market, to tackle the climate crisis... and to keep our people safe,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm at the Jan. 8 Honor Achievement Awards ceremony.
Representing some of the highest internal, non-monetary recognition that DOE employees and contractors can receive, the Secretary’s Honor Awards recognize DOE employees and contractors for their service and contributions to the department’s mission and the benefit of the nation.
“This extraordinary cohort of public servants has faced challenges and failure, sometimes head on, but came out the other side, achieved the extraordinary, and I know that you're not done yet. I look forward to seeing and benefiting from the solutions that you will continue to provide for our nation,” Granholm said.
This year, the DOE honored 28 teams with the Secretary of Energy Achievement Award. For the full list of winners, click here.
LLNL was honored for the following teams:
Exascale Computing Project (ECP) Leadership Team
The team successfully delivered the ECP, a 7-year, $1.8 billion collaboration among six DOE national laboratories to create the world’s first sustainable exascale ecosystem, resulting in the development and enhancement of 25 scientific application codes to provide breakthrough simulation results on exascale computers. Additionally, over 70 software technology products were delivered in an integrated package widely used by the high-performance computing community.
This first-of-a-kind software research, development and deployment (RD&D) project was jointly managed by the DOE Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration, with leadership from Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories. ECP also established public-private partnerships by funding computer vendors to prepare the U.S. industry for exascale system procurements, enhancing U.S. competitiveness in the global computing market. The legacy of ECP will be felt for decades through its delivered products, trained staff and best practices in leading large, collaborative RD&D software projects.
Nimble Subcritical Experiments Team
The team led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in collaboration with Los Alamos National Laboratory and the United Kingdom’s Atomic Weapons Establishment, successfully executed the first subcritical experiment in the Nimble series, conducted at the Principal Underground Laboratory for Subcritical Experiments (PULSE) at the Nevada National Security Site.
The unique data that was collected increases our scientific understanding of important dynamic processes under weapon relevant conditions, further enhancing confidence in our assessments and modernization of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. The team also showed agility and achieved cost and schedule savings by eliminating the usual practice of a downhole confirmatory experiment.
Space-Based Nuclear Detonation Detection Team
The team delivered the first Global Burst Detector IIIF to the United States Space Force — an incredible milestone resulting from a strong partnership between Headquarters, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, culminating a $1B investment and over a decade's worth of research, design, development, production and certification.
This first delivery represents an essential element of national nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation and nuclear security for the U.S. and achieves a long-envisioned standard for the ability to monitor current and future nuclear threats continuously from the Earth's surface to outer space. The Global Burst Detector IIIF success embodies the technical vision and innovation, long-term focus, national security perspective and multi-disciplinary engineering team that the NNSA national laboratories are uniquely capable of delivering.
WESTWORLD Program Team
WESTWORLD is a multi-laboratory consortium initiated seven years ago to address the US's critical energy infrastructure cybersecurity challenges. The team was recognized for developing key insights into adversary capabilities to hold US critical energy infrastructure at risk. They did this by executing the most complex cyber-physical experiments in DOE history. The experiments were the capstone of a multi-year campaign, including 2.5 years of research and development, and a series of increasingly challenging proof of concept events, drawing on the expertise and capabilities of 6 DOE labs and sites.
In addition to LLNL, the consortium consists of personnel from Idaho National Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Nevada National Security Sites, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, and DOE Headquarters.