A publication of the Advanced Simulation & Computing Division, NA-121.2, NNSA Defense Programs
June 2009
NA-ASC-500-09—Issue 11
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The Meisner Minute
I’d like to take a moment in this quarter’s issue to congratulate Lawrence Livermore National laboratory (LLNL) for their success in dedicating the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the early delivery of the Dawn supercomputer. What a great day for simulation at the forefront of science! The dedication of both these capabilities in the same week is symbolic of not only the effort required to do modern science, but also that it’s happening at our laboratories.
The Dawn dedication celebrated both the delivery of Dawn and the promise it brings of being able to run problems that challenge the limits of the previous Purple machine as “capacity” jobs on the recent Sequoia system. Similarly, NIF, the world's largest and highest-energy laser system, has captured the imagination of many because of its potential to make a difference in our scientific understanding of extreme conditions present in the explosion of a nuclear weapon.
High-performance computing supplied by the ASC program has been critical to NIF’s development. ASC resources have been used extensively to do numerical simulations that presage the first ignition experiments on NIF. Dawn, a 500 teraFLOPS machine delivered in April, has been dedicated for most of the month of May and into June to an unprecedented laser plasma interaction calculation that simulates beam propagation of one entire NIF beam over its full path length within an ignition target.
Development of massively-parallel multi-physics simulation codes by the ASC program enables experimental design and optimization of diagnostics on the NIF. Computational physicists from Sandia and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories are co-developing a high-energy density physics (HEDP) simulation code to support design work on the NIF and other HEDP facilities. This joint model was outlined in the ASC National Code Strategy and represents an unprecedented approach to national simulation tool development.
The Roadrunner petaflops supercomputer, is also being used to further the NIF objectives. Los Alamos is working to understand the behavior of laser-plasma instabilities from first principles. These calculations employ the VPIC particle-in-cell kinetic plasma simulation code, which has been modified to use the Roadrunner supercomputer very efficiently, and are among the largest of their type ever done. With Roadrunner, it is possible to model laser particle interactions in three dimensions under realistic NIF conditions with the goal of guiding future Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) experiments.
These are just a few examples of the critical role that high performance computing has played in bringing NIF to this threshold and the implications of future impacts that our inter-dependent successes will have on science.
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