LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 1.8 megajoules of 500-terawatt ultraviolet laser energy to a target. The energy, temperatures and pressures capable of being generated on the NIF allow scientists the ability to generate conditions similar to the center of the sun and explore the physics of planetary interiors, supernovae, black holes and thermonuclear burn. This year concludes a very successful multi-year plan of optimizations to the control & information systems and operational processes to increase the quantity of experimental target shots conducted in the facility. In addition, many new system control and diagnostic capabilities have been commissioned for operational use to maximize the scientific value produced. With NIF expecting to be operational for greater than 20 years focus has also been placed on optimizing the software processes to improve the sustainability of the control system. This talk will report on the current status of each of these areas in support of the wide variety of experiments being conducted in the facility.
Release No.: LLNL-ABS-727237-DRAFT
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) uses powerful lasers to compress targets, to study high energy density physics. Sophisticated diagnostics are placed close to the targets to record the results of each shot. The placement of these diagnostics relative to the target is critical to the mission, with alignment tolerances on the order of 500 microns. The integration of commercial laser-based survey instruments into the NIF control system has improved diagnostic alignment in many ways. The Advanced Tracking Laser Alignment System (ATLAS) project incorporates commercial Faro laser tracker instruments into the diagnostic factory and the target chamber, improving alignment accuracy over prior systems. The system uses multiple retroreflectors mounted on each of the diagnostic positioners to translate to a 6D position in the NIF target chamber volume. This enables a closed loop alignment process to align each diagnostic. This paper provides an overview of how the laser tracker is used in diagnostic alignment, and discusses challenges met by the control system to achieve this integration.
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 1.8 megajoules and 500-terawatts of ultraviolet light to a target. To aid in NIF control system troubleshooting, the commercial product Splunk was introduced to collate and view system log files collected from 2,600 processes running on 1,800 servers, front-end processors, and embedded controllers. We have since extended Splunk's access into current and historical control system configuration data, as well as experiment setup and results. Leveraging Splunk's built-in data visualization and analytical features, we have built custom tools to gain insight into the operation of the control system and to increase its reliability and integrity. Use cases include predictive analytics for alerting on pending failures, analyzing shot operations critical path to improve operational efficiency, performance monitoring, project management, and in analyzing and monitoring system availability. This talk will cover the various ways we've leveraged Splunk to improve and maintain NIF's integrated control system.
LLNL-ABS-728830
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
Established control systems for scientific experimental facilities offer several levels of user interfaces to match domain-specific needs and preferences of experimentalists, operational and engineering staff. At the National Ignition Facility, the low-level device panels address technicians' need for comprehensive hardware control, while Shot Automation software allows NIF Shot Director to advance thousands of devices at once through a carefully orchestrated shot sequence. MATLAB scripting with NIF Layering Toolbox has enabled formation of intricate Deuterium-Tritium ice layers for fusion experiments. The latest addition to this family of user interfaces is the Target Area Alignment Tool (TAAT), which guides NIF operators through hundreds of measurement and motion steps necessary to precisely align targets and diagnostics for each experiment inside of the NIF's 10-meter target chamber. In this paper, we discuss how this new tool has integrated familiar spreadsheet calculations with intuitive visual aids and checklist-like scripting to allow NIF Process Engineers to automate and streamline alignment sequences, contributing towards NIF Shot Rate enhancement goals.
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 1.8 megajoules and 500-terawatts of ultraviolet light to a target. Officially commissioned as an operational facility on March 21, 2009, NIF is expected to conduct research experiments thru 2039. The 30-year lifespan of the control system presents several challenges in meeting reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) expectations. As NIF continues to expand on its experimental capabilities, the control system's software base of 3.5 million lines of code grows with most of the legacy software still in operational use. Supporting this software is further complicated by technology life cycles and turnover of senior experienced staff. This talk will present lessons learned and new initiatives related to technology refreshes, risk mitigation, and changes to our software development and test methodology to ensure high control system availability for supporting experiments throughout NIF's lifetime.
LLNL-ABS-727374