A publication of the Office of Advanced Simulation & Computing, NA-114, NNSA Defense Programs
December 2007
NA-ASC-500-07—Issue
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ASC Salutes
“The reward for me,” said Brian S. Pudliner, code physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “is to sit in the audience at a high-level technical briefing and hear about an issue of national interest being solved with a tool I helped create.”
With a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Illinois and a Master’s degree in Computer Science, Brian began his career at Livermore as a computer scientist specializing in high performance computing (HPC). Continuing on the same project, he moved to Livermore’s Weapons & Complex Integration (WCI) Principal Associate Directorate (formerly, Defense & Nuclear Technologies Directorate) in conjunction with the ASC Program to work as a physicist and help laboratory scientists take advantage of HPC for large simulations of nuclear weapons. Brian now runs a project comprised of 22 code physicists and computer scientists. He and his team continue to push the boundaries of what is possible in weapon physics simulation—more physics at resolutions never reached before. The codes he and his team develop are used to address complex problems in stockpile stewardship by Livermore’s weapons designers.
According to Frank Graziani, Livermore Boost Program lead, Brian and his team are a major factor behind the success of ASC as a national program and why code development at WCI is of such high quality. “Brian’s unique ability to combine rigorous scientific thinking with the pragmatic has resulted in a tool that pushes the envelope on scientific inquiry. What was impossible 5 to 10 years ago, Brian and his team have made possible. The fact that the tool Brian and his team have created is fast, robust, and accurate has resulted in it being the major workhorse for primary design at LLNL.”
Brian was part of the original Burn Code Project Team. This team was cited for completion of the first full-system, 3D simulations of a nuclear weapon explosion, using a massively parallel, multi-physics weapons code. Today, Brian, his code team, and the laboratory’s weapons designers use these original first-of-a-kind codes in their day-to-day work. What was once cutting edge—only three years ago—is now standard operating procedure.
“People who are curious thrive here,” said Brian. “There are an enormous number of unsolved problems in the physics and computer science arenas for this type of large-scale simulation. We are never in danger of getting bored. Being part of a multi-disciplinary team, at the edge of HPC, addressing problems of national interest, makes this an amazing environment to work in.”
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