Algorithmic warfare: the laboratory lights up to connect the next generation supercomputers
The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory completed its modernization project in June.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory photo
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 that, in turn, will provide increased processing power to certify and test future weapons.
Lawrence Livermore, one of three federally funded research and development labs developing nuclear weapons, completed the $100 million “exascale computing facility modernization project” just as tensions with Russia have renewed focus on nuclear capabilities. said Rob Neely, the Advanced Simulation Lab. and Computing Lead and Program Director.
Since the United States halted underground testing in 1992, scientists have developed advanced code and software, which continue to improve, to ensure the weapons’ capabilities.
And that’s the core of the lab’s work, creating application code that can simulate how the nuclear stockpile would work without physical evidence. The lab can then certify that the weapons will perform as required, Neely explained.
“We are trying to make our systems more secure, less vulnerable to threats from adversaries,” he said.
“Every new computer we get, we advance our codes,” he said. They become more predictive, use higher-fidelity physics, and the lab learns what’s missing, he said.
Then “we arrive at a horizon; we learn the limits of what we can know with a given system,” he said. That drives the need for ever-faster computers, he added.
The project raised the lab’s power capacity to nearly 1,800 watts per square foot, for a total of about 85 megawatts, project manager Anna Maria Bailey said. That’s almost enough energy to power all the homes of the nearly 88,000 residents who live in Livermore, California, where the lab is located, she said.
When construction of the facility was first completed in 2004, “I never in my wildest dreams thought we would have so much power in one place,” he said.
The energy 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 compute at least one exaflop, which is one quintillion calculations per second.
That kind of processing power generates a lot of heat. However, when the new computer is installed in 2023, upgrades to the installation will allow the computer to run calculations without overheating, he said.
The modernization work more than doubled the facility’s cooling capacity. The newly installed cooling towers raised the system maximum from 10,000 tons to 28,000 tons of water, according to a press release.
Other upgrades included a 115-kilovolt transmission line, air switches, substation transformers, and 13.8-kilovolt secondary feeders.
The additional power will also be needed to keep the facility’s current supercomputer, IBM’s Sierra, running during the transition. In about five years, the additional power will come in handy as the facility moves from El Capitan to an even more advanced system.
“This type of planning and execution in modernizing our computing facilities allows us to move into the exascale era, and not just El Capitan, but also bring a second exascale class system online within the next decade without having to turn off El Capitan first. ,” the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Under Secretary for Nuclear Security, Jill Hruby, said in a press release.
This huge increase in power and computing capacity comes just in time to meet the nation’s nuclear deterrent needs.
The Pentagon is modernizing delivery platforms, which consist of intercontinental ballistic missiles, bombers and submarines known as the Nuclear Triad. The integration of the new weapons on the new platforms will require new tests.
Supercomputing power allows the government to test new systems like the Sentinel, which will replace the Minuteman III missile, without the use of underground testing, Neely said.
“Twenty years ago, people would laugh if you said we can put a new system in reserve without going to [live] evidence,” he said. “They just didn’t believe it.”
The lab began the El Capitan site infrastructure project earlier this year, Bailey said. Now that the facility has the capacity to house the supercomputer, scientists can begin connecting power, cooling, and networking to the system itself.
Once the machine is on site, the researchers will run tests such as multi-physics, multi-domain codes, which model the effects on weapons under different conditions, such as heat and cold, and scenarios such as detonation and explosion, Neely said.
Concerns about Russia’s nuclear force have increased as the United States and its allies have lent support to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, he noted.
“The term ‘nuclear deterrence’ is in the headlines now more than it has been in the 30 years I’ve worked in the lab because of saber rattling from Putin and people like that,” he said. “So it’s something that I think people are starting to pay attention to.”
Topics: info technology, Nuclear, Training and Simulation