Lab Powers Up to Plug In Next-Gen Supercomputers.

• Author: Roaten, Meredith
• Position: ALGORITHMIC WARFARE

Supercomputers help the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration maintain confidence in the nation's nuclear weapons.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently completed upgrades to a facility that will provide a home for next-generation supercomputers which in turn will provide greater processing power to certify and evaluate future weapons.

Lawrence Livermore--one of the three federally funded research and development labs that develop nuclear weapons--completed the $100 million "exascale computing facility modernization project" just as tensions with Russia have renewed the focus on nuclear capabilities, said Rob Neely, the lab's advanced simulation and computing lead and program director.

Since the United States stopped underground testing in 1992, scientists have developed advanced codes and software--which continue to be improved--to ensure the weapons' capabilities.

And that's at the heart of the lab's work, creating application codes that can simulate how the nuclear stockpile would work without physical testing. The lab can then certify that the weapons will perform as required, Neely explained.

"We're trying to make our systems safer, more secure, less vulnerable to threats from adversaries," he said.

"Every new computer we get, we make advances to our codes," he said. They become more predictive, use higher fidelity physics and the lab learns what it is missing, he said.

Then "we get to a horizon; we learn the limits of what we can know with a given system," he said. That pushes the need for faster and faster computers, he added.

The project kicked the lab's power capacity up to nearly 1,800 watts per square foot, totaling about 85 megawatts, said Project Manager Anna Maria Bailey. That's almost enough energy to power every home for the nearly 88,000 residents living in Livermore, California, where the lab is based, she said.

When construction was first completed on the facility in 2004, "Not in my wildest dreams did I think we would have that much power in one location," she said.

The power will be used for one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world--El Capitan. Exascale systems like El Capitan--built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD--can calculate at least one exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second.

That kind of processing power generates a lot of heat. However, when the new computer is installed in 2023, the upgrades to the facility will allow the computer to run...