LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 2.1 MJ of 500 TW ultraviolet laser light to a target. NIF experiments facilitate the study of extreme physical conditions at temperatures exceeding 100 million K and 100 billion times atmospheric pressure allowing scientists the ability to generate conditions similar to the center of the sun and explore the physics of planetary interiors, supernovae and thermonuclear burn. This year concludes a series of optimizations and enhancements to the control & information systems to sustain the quantity of experimental target shots while developing an enhanced precision diagnostic system to optimize and increase the power and energy capabilities of the facility. In addition, many new system control and diagnostic capabilities have been commissioned to increase the understanding of target performance. This year also concludes a multi-year sustainability project to migrate the control system software to Java. This talk will report on the current status of each of these areas in support of the wide variety of experiments being conducted.
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.