A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NNSA Defense Programs
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue 3
May 2007
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The View from HQ
By Dimitri Kusnezov
I have been spending much of my time these days thinking about science, technology and engineering and the role of the laboratories and how that will be reflected in the Complex of the future. This is on my mind for two reasons: one is my responsibility to produce a science and technology roadmap for Complex 2030—Defense Program’s vision for what we should be doing in 2030—and how we plan to get there. The second reason is to determine what this means for the near-term roles of the laboratories. For some time now I have been concerned that too much of our national security mission is tied to the nuclear weapons monolith, leveraged on the continuation of an enterprise that has not fully transitioned out of the cold-war. Today’s and tomorrow’s threats are far different than what we worried about decades ago, but our mission space has never been redefined to meet our new reality. While the laboratories have recognized some of this, the question here is whether there is a mission space that requires federal land-lording and strategic investment that we are not planning for today. I believe this is the case, and in conjunction with the Complex 2030 roadmap, I am endeavoring to push this along.
Is Complex 2030 enough for planning for science and technology? That depends on whether it is largely focused within the weapons’ account. We need to think about investments that might currently fit in our mission space, but which might be better suited to tomorrow’s threats. With such ponderings, combined with events during the last two years, it has been a wild ride. Both Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore are under new ownership; NNSA has experienced leadership changes at all levels; and the RRW decision has spawned not only public debate, but perhaps an uncommon level of inter-lab public discourse, and is now the subject of congressional language that has taken both sides of the issue. Things could not be murkier. But all this indicates to me that we are at a cross-road, and with this turmoil comes opportunity for change.
So what does this have to do with ASC? We are faced with quite a few challenges. First, in the near term, we will be facing the challenge of reducing the footprint of where we site our largest platforms in the 2010 horizon. This does not mean that only host sites can field platforms, but rather where we actually locate the most costly investments. It is entirely possible that the intellectual development of new technologies is not co-located with the final production system. We will continue to work with the ASC Execs to better understand this issue during 2008. It is entirely possible as well that Congressional direction will decide our hand one way or another. Second, in the area of codes, we are not anywhere near achieving predictive capability yet. We are pioneering computational science at the most remarkable scales, and together we are learning how to define notions of predictivity through verification, validation and uncertainty quantification. We are uncovering the challenges that the rest of the world will eventually face, and this gives us the chance to define this frontier in a manner that can have a lasting impact. The modeling efforts at the laboratories are crucial for success, in terms of both development and implementation. Further progress of the thermonuclear burn initiative in FY2007 and 2008 is an important part of this.
To me, ASC remains the focal point through which we enable not only stewardship, as the only conduit to conduct nuclear tests (albeit virtually), but as an exemplar of the future of national security sciences. It is indeed an exciting time.
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