LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s largest laser system for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density (HED) experiments. Design of NIF control system started in the 1990s, incorporating established hardware and software technologies of that era. The architecture of the control system has stood the test of time, successfully scaling up to full 192 laser beam configuration in 2009, and then transitioning to 24x7 operations and sustaining 400 shots annually since 2016. The control system has grown with NIF to add new major capabilities, such as cryogenic layering, a petawatt-class laser, 3D neutron imaging and others. In parallel, with scaling up and efficiency optimizations, the software had to adapt to changes dictated by the fast-paced computer industry. Some of our originally chosen technologies have become obsolete and replaced by new programming languages, frameworks and paradigms. In this talk, we will discuss how the NIF control system has leveraged the strengths of its distributed, cross-platform architecture to successfully modernize "in-place" computing platforms and programming languages without impacting the demanding experiment schedule.
