(AGENPARL) - Roma, 20 Ottobre 2023(AGENPARL) – ven 20 ottobre 2023 A weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews
items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for
the content in the links below.
….. LLNL Report, Oct. 20, 2023
LLNL Director Kim Budil.
… A role model for women
LLNL Director Kim Budil Receives San Francisco Business Times ‘Inspire Award’
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Director Kim Budil has been selected
by the /San Francisco Business Times/ (SFBT) as one of four recipients of
the 2023 Inspire Award.
As part of its annual Influential Women in Bay Area Business Awards, SFBT
recognizes the unique achievements of a select group of female leaders with
the Inspire Award. This year, the award celebrates women leading change in
climate and sustainability.
“At LLNL, we apply world-leading science and technology to address
today’s most significant national security challenges, ranging from
critical issues in nuclear deterrence to important questions in climate and
energy security. From developing the first global climate models to exploring
the energy systems of the future, we have been making important contributions
in this area since our founding more than 70 years ago,” Budil said.. “It
is an honor to be a part of this outstanding group of leaders who are working
to address one of the most important challenges facing the world today..”
Read More
LLNL Director Kim Budil Receives San Francisco Business Times ‘Inspire Award’
El Capitan will be the most powerful computing machine in the world.
… Scaling El Capitan
When Lawrence Livermore’s next-generation supercomputer El Capitan is
deployed in 2024, it will likely be the most powerful computing machine in
the world, delivering more than two quintillion floating-point operations per
second (2 exaFLOPs) in service of its national security missions.
Once fully operational, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s
first exascale supercomputer will perform critical modeling and simulation
functions to support America’s nuclear stockpile.
But a system as large and complex as “El Cap” doesn’t magically appear
overnight. It takes years of planning and preparation, and hundreds of
employees at LLNL and the Lab’s industry partners, to lay the groundwork
for a machine comprising thousands of compute nodes and requiring as much
energy as a medium-sized city. Over several years, teams have prepared the
infrastructure for El Capitan, designing and building the computing
facility’s upgrades for power and cooling, installing storage and compute
components and connecting everything together.
Once all the pieces are in place, the life of El Cap as world-class
supercomputer begins. Through the lifespan of the machine, Lab employees will
need to operate, troubleshoot and maintain El Capitan around the clock, seven
days a week, ensuring that scientists, physicists and code teams can perform
their calculations efficiently and in a timely manner.
Read More
New research reaffirms that ancient human footprints found in White Sands
National Park, New Mexico, date to between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago,
placing humans in North America thousands of years earlier than once thought.
Image courtesy of USGS.
… Ice Age humans thrived in the West
Bay Area study helps confirm age of ghostly human footprints
Tree pollen trapped in ancient sand and analyzed by Bay Area scientists
reaffirms that humans thrived in North America as long as 23,000 years
ago, much earlier than once thought.
The pollen, found alongside ghostly human footprints in White Sands National
Park in New Mexico, adds to evidence that people arrived long before the Ice
Age’s glaciers melted. And they behaved a lot like us — carrying
children, slipping in mud and hunting wild animals for food.
The proposed age of these footprints was announced in 2021 by U.S. Geological
Survey research geologists, but the finding was so extraordinary that it
demanded additional testing. Scholars called it into question, saying that
the research technique was prone to unreliable results. The claim was
controversial because it upset the previous assumption that the tracks
belonged to people who had migrated from Asia across a land bridge into
Alaska some 14,000 years ago after the melting of Ice Age glaciers opened up
new corridors, later creating the famed Clovis Culture.
To test the veracity of that contentious estimate, Susan Zimmerman of
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and UC Berkeley and U.S. Geological
Survey geographer David Wahl, studied grains of pollen, one of the most
durable organic materials in nature. Their analysis supported the original
finding. So did a second technique, called optically stimulated luminescence.
Read More
Bay Area study helps confirm age of ghostly human footprints
The W80-4 team completed extensive testing of the Environmental Test Unit 1,
collecting data needed to qualify the W80-4 warhead. Testing included
multiple temperatures and a telemetry system to capture internal and external
environments. Image courtesy of Sandia National Laboratories.
… Keeping weapons in fighting shape
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak34nj/air-force-successfully-tested-secret-new-stealth-missile-with-mock-nuke-reports-reveal
America’s nuclear weapons are aging, and the Pentagon plans to spend more
than $600 billion to keep the potentially world-ending weapons in fighting
shape. One of these massive investments paid off in 2022 when the Air Force
successfully tested a new secret stealth missile armed with a dummy version
of a novel nuclear warhead, government reports have revealed.
The Air Force successfully tested the stealth missile from the belly of a
plane first made in the 1950s using an updated version of a nuclear warhead
first made in the 1970s.
According to a National Nuclear Security Administration report, “the LRSO
and W80-4 Life Extension Program joint test teams completed the first powered
flight test of a LRSO Cruise Missile with W80-4 Warhead released from a B-52
aircraft. The missile successfully released from the aircraft, powered its
engine and executed all in-flight maneuvers.”
The LRSO and W80-4 nuclear warheads are replacements for aging weapons
systems.
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories
team developed the warhead test asset, an Environmental Test Unit. The
Environmental Test Unit successfully executed all pre-arm/pre-release
criteria and collected environmental data for the duration of the flight.
This is a significant milestone for the joint program and first collection of
representative LRSO free flight data, used to populate the W80-4 STS, define
environmental specifications, inform design decisions and validate
computational models.
Read More
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ak34nj/air-force-successfully-tested-secret-new-stealth-missile-with-mock-nuke-reports-reveal
An LLNL developed instrument launched into space to explore the asteroid
Psyche. Image courtesy of NASA.
… Going hard core
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Lab_instrument_now_on_two_billion_mile_journey_to_the_metallic_asteroid_Psyche_999.html
An instrument designed and built by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
(LLNL) researchers departed Earth last week on a two-billion-mile, nearly
six-year journey through space to explore a rare, largely metal asteroid.
The Livermore high-purity germanium (HPGe) gamma-ray sensor is an essential
part of a larger gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) built in collaboration with
researchers from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (JHAPL) in Laurel,
Maryland. It is part of a suite of instruments set to make the first-ever
visit to Psyche, the largest metal asteroid in the solar system. The Psyche
mission is led by Arizona State University (ASU).
“Psyche is scientifically interesting because it is thought to be a planetary
core, a remnant of a collision during the early stages of the development of
the solar system,” said LLNL physicist Morgan Burks, who heads the Lab team.
“We believe that exploration of the Psyche asteroid could increase our
understanding of the hidden cores of Earth, Mars, Mercury and Venus.”
Psyche mission principal investigator Lindy Elkins-Tanton of ASU noted that
the exploration of Psyche will permit scientists to “literally visit a
planetary core — the only way humankind ever can.”
Read More
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Lab_instrument_now_on_two_billion_mile_journey_to_the_metallic_asteroid_Psyche_999.html
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provides solutions to our nation’s most important national security
challenges through innovative science, engineering and technology. Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory is managed by Lawrence Livermore National
Security, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security
Administration.
Read previous Lab Report articles online https://www.llnl.gov/news/lab-report
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