Oct. 20, 2023
LLNL Director Kim Budil.
A role model for women
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kim Budil has been selected by the San Francisco Business Times (SFBT) as one of four recipients of the 2023 Inspire Award.
As part of its annual Influential Women in Bay Area Business Awards, SFBT recognizes the unique achievements of a select group of female leaders with the Inspire Award. This year, the award celebrates women leading change in climate and sustainability.
“At LLNL, we apply world-leading science and technology to address today’s most significant national security challenges, ranging from critical issues in nuclear deterrence to important questions in climate and energy security. From developing the first global climate models to exploring the energy systems of the future, we have been making important contributions in this area since our founding more than 70 years ago,” Budil said. “It is an honor to be a part of this outstanding group of leaders who are working to address one of the most important challenges facing the world today.”
El Capitan will be the most powerful computing machine in the world.
Scaling El Capitan
When Lawrence Livermore’s next-generation supercomputer El Capitan is deployed in 2024, it will likely be the most powerful computing machine in the world, delivering more than two quintillion floating-point operations per second (2 exaFLOPs) in service of its national security missions.
Once fully operational, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s first exascale supercomputer will perform critical modeling and simulation functions to support America’s nuclear stockpile.
But a system as large and complex as “El Cap” doesn’t magically appear overnight. It takes years of planning and preparation, and hundreds of employees at LLNL and the Lab’s industry partners, to lay the groundwork for a machine comprising thousands of compute nodes and requiring as much energy as a medium-sized city. Over several years, teams have prepared the infrastructure for El Capitan, designing and building the computing facility’s upgrades for power and cooling, installing storage and compute components and connecting everything together.
Once all the pieces are in place, the life of El Cap as world-class supercomputer begins. Through the lifespan of the machine, Lab employees will need to operate, troubleshoot and maintain El Capitan around the clock, seven days a week, ensuring that scientists, physicists and code teams can perform their calculations efficiently and in a timely manner.
New research reaffirms that ancient human footprints found in White Sands National Park, New Mexico, date to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago, placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought. Image courtesy of USGS.
Ice Age humans thrived in the West
Tree pollen trapped in ancient sand and analyzed by Bay Area scientists reaffirms that humans thrived in North America as long as 23,000 years ago, much earlier than once thought.
The pollen, found alongside ghostly human footprints in White Sands National Park in New Mexico, adds to evidence that people arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted. And they behaved a lot like us — carrying children, slipping in mud and hunting wild animals for food.
The proposed age of these footprints was announced in 2021 by U.S. Geological Survey research geologists, but the finding was so extraordinary that it demanded additional testing. Scholars called it into question, saying that the research technique was prone to unreliable results. The claim was controversial because it upset the previous assumption that the tracks belonged to people who had migrated from Asia across a land bridge into Alaska some 14,000 years ago after the melting of Ice Age glaciers opened up new corridors, later creating the famed Clovis Culture.
To test the veracity of that contentious estimate, Susan Zimmerman of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley and U.S. Geological Survey geographer David Wahl, studied grains of pollen, one of the most durable organic materials in nature. Their analysis supported the original finding. So did a second technique, called optically stimulated luminescence.
The W80-4 team completed extensive testing of the Environmental Test Unit 1, collecting data needed to qualify the W80-4 warhead. Testing included multiple temperatures and a telemetry system to capture internal and external environments. Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.
Keeping weapons in fighting shape
America's nuclear weapons are aging, and the Pentagon plans to spend more than $600 billion to keep the potentially world-ending weapons in fighting shape. One of these massive investments paid off in 2022 when the Air Force successfully tested a new secret stealth missile armed with a dummy version of a novel nuclear warhead, government reports have revealed.
The Air Force successfully tested the stealth missile from the belly of a plane first made in the 1950s using an updated version of a nuclear warhead first made in the 1970s.
According to a National Nuclear Security Administration report, “the LRSO and W80-4 Life Extension Program joint test teams completed the first powered flight test of a LRSO Cruise Missile with W80-4 Warhead released from a B-52 aircraft. The missile successfully released from the aircraft, powered its engine and executed all in-flight maneuvers.”
The LRSO and W80-4 nuclear warheads are replacements for aging weapons systems.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories team developed the warhead test asset, an Environmental Test Unit. The Environmental Test Unit successfully executed all pre-arm/pre-release criteria and collected environmental data for the duration of the flight. This is a significant milestone for the joint program and first collection of representative LRSO free flight data, used to populate the W80-4 STS, define environmental specifications, inform design decisions and validate computational models.
An LLNL developed instrument launched into space to explore the asteroid Psyche. Image courtesy of NASA.
Going hard core
An instrument designed and built by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers departed Earth last week on a two-billion-mile, nearly six-year journey through space to explore a rare, largely metal asteroid.
The Livermore high-purity germanium (HPGe) gamma-ray sensor is an essential part of a larger gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) built in collaboration with researchers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHAPL) in Laurel, Maryland. It is part of a suite of instruments set to make the first-ever visit to Psyche, the largest metal asteroid in the solar system. The Psyche mission is led by Arizona State University (ASU).
"Psyche is scientifically interesting because it is thought to be a planetary core, a remnant of a collision during the early stages of the development of the solar system," said LLNL physicist Morgan Burks, who heads the Lab team. "We believe that exploration of the Psyche asteroid could increase our understanding of the hidden cores of Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus."
Psyche mission principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of ASU noted that the exploration of Psyche will permit scientists to "literally visit a planetary core — the only way humankind ever can."
