LLNL, Livermore, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world’s most energetic laser, completed a multi-year project for migrating control software platforms from Ada to Java in 2019. Following that work, a technology refresh of NIF’s Digital Video (DVID) systems was identified as the next important step. The DVIDs were facing long-term maintenance risk due to its obsolete Window XP platform, with over 500 computers to be individually upgraded and patched, 24 camera types with a variety of I/O interfaces and proprietary drivers/software with their licensing needs. In this presentation, we discuss how we leveraged the strengths of NIF’s distributed, cross platform architecture and our system migration expertise to migrate the DVID platforms to diskless clients booting off a single purpose-built immutable Linux image, and replacing proprietary camera drivers with open-source drivers. The in-place upgrades with well-defined fallback strategies ensured minimal impact to the continuous 24/7 shot operations. We will also present our strategy for continuous build, test, and release of the Linux OS image to keep up with future security patches and package upgrades.
LLNL IM Document Release Number: LLNL-ABS-822092
