LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
For the last 10 years, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) has provided scientists with an application, the Campaign Management Tool (CMT), to define the parameters needed to achieve their experimental goals. Conceived to support the commissioning of the NIF, CMT allows users to define over 18,000 settings. As NIF has transitioned to an operational facility, the low-level focus of CMT is no longer required by most users and makes setting up experiments unnecessarily complicated. At the same time, requirements have evolved as operations has identified new functionality required to achieve higher shot execution rates. Technology has also changed since CMT was developed, with the availability of the internet and web-based tools being two of the biggest changes. To address these requirements while adding new laser and diagnostic capabilities, NIF has begun to replace CMT with the Shot Setup Tool (SST). This poses challenges in terms of software development and deployment as the introduction of the new tool must be done with minimal interruption to ongoing operations. The development process, transition strategies and technologies chosen to migrate from CMT to SST will be presented.
LLNL-ABS-728212
