Dec. 6, 2024
LLNL’s National Ignition Facility target chamber is where the magic happens.
Smashing a nuclear-fusion record
The sun shone brightly on Livermore, California, on June 8, 2011, when researchers charged up the world’s largest laser for its first major fusion experiment. It might have seemed like a good omen for the stadium-sized facility, which is a flagship project of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
That day, the laser at Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) blasted a pea-sized target with a huge jolt of energy. It was an important first step, but the test ended with a brief flash and a fizzle. This result would become frustratingly familiar.
The facility was designed with a singular goal: to compress hydrogen isotopes into a white-hot core, where their nuclei would meld to create helium and enough surplus energy to drive a cascade of fusion reactions. Nobody had expected success straight away, but by June 2011 the researchers were already eight months into a two-year effort that was expected to achieve “ignition”: when an experiment generates more energy than the laser supplies. Those two years would drag into 12.
In December 2022, the Laboratory finally reached its ignition goal as laid out by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences 25 years earlier, and the researchers have since upped their game. NIF shattered records this February by producing double the amount of fusion energy that the laser provided, and the facility confirmed its sixth successful ignition experiment this month.
With a peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPS, El Capitan provides Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with a flagship machine 22 times more powerful than its previous fastest supercomputer, Sierra. (Photo: Garry McLeod/LLNL)
El Capitan reaches high
A supercomputer housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has officially been crowned as the world’s fastest. The computer, known as “El Capitan,” is a collaboration between LLNL, the National Nuclear Security Administration and Hewlett Packard Enterprises.
El Capitan is an exascale system dedicated to national security. Exascale computing systems, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, feature more powerful hardware than the previous generation of supercomputers and are able to process information much faster.
El Capitan’s processing speed has been verified as 1.742 exaFLOPs — 1.742 quintillion calculations per second — on the High Performance Linpack, according to LLNL. The High Performance Linpack is the standard benchmark used to evaluate supercomputing.
LLNL researchers worked with Russian scientists in the discovery of Element 116. (Image: Adobe Stock)
The facts and nothing but the facts
Livermorium, a synthetic element with the symbol Lv and atomic number 116, is a fascinating subject for science enthusiasts. Named after Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, this element is part of the post-transition metals group.
Discovered in 2000 by a team of Russian and American scientists, Livermorium is highly radioactive and has no stable isotopes. Its most stable isotope, Livermorium-293, has a half-life of about 60 milliseconds.
Due to its short-lived nature, Livermorium doesn't have practical applications yet, but it plays a crucial role in scientific research, particularly in understanding the properties of superheavy elements.
Running on the second-generation Cerebras WSE-2 — a cutting-edge processor boasting 850,000 cores — the team from LLNL, LANDL and Sandia and Cerebras Systems demonstrated the chip can perform complex simulations involving hundreds of thousands of atoms at speeds previously thought unattainable.
It’s massive
In a groundbreaking development for computational science, a team of National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Tri-Lab researchers, including Lawrence Livermore, has unveiled a revolutionary approach to molecular dynamics (MD) simulations using the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE), the world’s largest computer chip.
The AI “chip” is the size of a pizza box and is making some impressive claims about its AI processing performance.
At the recent Supercomputing conference, Cerebras announced a breakthrough in molecular dynamics simulations. Data from third-party benchmark firm Artificial Analysis shows a single Cerebras CS-2 system with one Wafer Scale Engine-2 (WSE) achieved over 1.1 million steps per second, which is 748 times faster than what is possible on the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier supercomputer.
Molecular dynamics simulations are critical for understanding the behavior of materials at the atomic level, driving advancements in fields such as materials science, biophysics and drug design. MD simulations are of particular interest to the NNSA labs, where they are essential for exploring how materials behave when experiments are either too expensive or are otherwise unable to reach relevant conditions such as temperature, pressure and time- and length-scales, researchers said.
Fast Cure silicone in direct-ink-write additive manufacturing can produce previously unattainable structures, such as tall, overhanging, or thin-walled structures. Such structures, featured on the October journal cover of Advanced Materials Technologies, are obtained thanks to the quick gelling process.
That’s one fast cure
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed a new method to 3D print sturdy silicone structures that are bigger, taller, thinner and more porous than ever before.
he team’s two-part “fast cure” silicone-based ink for direct ink writing mixes just before printing and sets quickly at room temperature, allowing for longer print times, simplifying the fabrication process, and ensuring structures will not collapse or sag, even in complex shapes and configurations.
“There are other methods for silicone direct-ink writing, but this is the simplest solution and the bulletproof one,” said Anna Güell Izard, a postdoc in the Materials Engineering Division (MED) and the research paper’s first author. “There is nothing extra to worry about; you can just print.”
