(AGENPARL) – ven 03 maggio 2024 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, May 3, 2024
Lead mechanical engineer Hillary Johnson and lead electrical engineer Collin
Averill adjust a heat strap on the infrared detector assembly from the James
Webb Space Telescope next to a model of Pandora’s telescope. Photo by Garry
McLoud/LLNL
… Coming to an exoplanet near you
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/LLNL_Pandora_SmallSat_mission_clears_major_NASA_milestone_on_the_path_toward_launch_999.html
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Pandora SmallSat mission recently
passed NASA’s critical design review: a major milestone for the mission to
continue its journey toward launch. The Pandora SmallSat mission will study
planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, and their stars.
Astronomers know there are more planets than stars. But the quest to
understand what these worlds beyond our solar system are like leaves many
unanswered questions — including if any might be habitable.
Pandora will untangle signals from 20 stars and their 39 exoplanets to
understand how changes in starlight affect measurements of these worlds’
atmospheres. Understanding these signals is key to interpreting which signals
are from exoplanet atmospheres and which are from starspots, stellar
phenomena that are similar to sunspots and can contaminate data.
Read More
https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/LLNL_Pandora_SmallSat_mission_clears_major_NASA_milestone_on_the_path_toward_launch_999.html
Jennifer Pett-Ridge has been named a fellow of the Ecology Society of
America.
… She digs dirt

Ecological Society of America announces 2024 Fellows

The Ecological Society of America has announced its 2024 fellows, including
Lawrence Livermore’s Jennifer Pett-Ridge.
The society’s fellowship program recognizes the many ways in which its
members contribute to ecological research, communication, education,
management and policy. This year, the ESA governing board has confirmed nine
new fellows and 10 new early-career fellows. Pett-Ridge was selected for her
work in soil ecology.
As the child of a master gardener, Pett-Ridge acquired a taste for the
outdoors from an early age and knew that she wanted to go into a field
related to the environment, eventually growing to become an expert in soils.
Pett-Ridge has a track record of bringing together big teams and encouraging
diverse team members’ ideas and talents. She also is passionate about
training the next generation of young scientists and has played an increasing
role in teaching and mentoring graduate students via her appointments at UC
Merced and UC Berkeley.
Read More

Ecological Society of America announces 2024 Fellows

International team of researchers from LLNL, Fraunhofer ILT and ELI at the
ELI Beamlines Facility, Prague. Photo courtesy of ELI ERIC.
… Machines help push the limits
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Machine_Learning_Pushes_High-Power_Lasing_Limits/p5/a69944
Collaborating scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL),
Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT (Fraunhofer ILT), and Extreme
Light Infrastructure (ELI) are leading an effort to optimize high-intensity
high-repetition-rate laser technology using machine learning. The
collaboration, the researchers said, aims to increase understanding and
practical application of high-intensity lasers.
“Our goal was to demonstrate robust diagnosis of laser-accelerated ions and
electrons from solid targets at a high intensity and repetition rate,” said
LLNL lead researcher Matthew Hill. “Supported by rapid feedback from a
machine-learning optimization algorithm to the laser front end, it was
possible to maximize the total ion yield of the system.”
More than 4,000 shots were fired during the campaign, which consistently
exceeded laser intensities of 3 × 1021 W/cm² onto solid targets,
demonstrating optimization of ion yield above the nominal baseline
performance. The experiment took place at the ELI Beamlines Facility in
Czechia, where the researchers used the state of the art High-Repetition-Rate
Advanced Petawatt Laser System (L3-HAPLS) to generate protons in the
laser-plasma ion accelerator.
According to the researchers, the effort supports future advancements in
fields such as medical therapy, materials science and non-destructive
analysis in areas such as cultural heritage and archaeology.
Read More
https://www.photonics.com/Articles/Machine_Learning_Pushes_High-Power_Lasing_Limits/p5/a69944
Firebaugh former mayor and current council member and Socio-Environmental and
Education Network member Felipe Perez gives out information about COVID to
fieldworkers in the community of West Fresno. Image courtesy of Minerva
Uribe-Robles.
… A leap forward to a clean-energy future
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will provide technical
assistance to 30 disadvantaged communities in west Fresno County to provide a
future in clean-energy projects, including carbon capture and storage.
The project is part of the Department of Energy’s Local Energy Action
Program (LEAP) that aims to facilitate sustained community-wide economic and
environmental benefits primarily through DOE’s clean-energy deployment work.
This opportunity is specifically open to low-income, energy-burdened
communities that also are disadvantaged and/or are experiencing direct
economic impacts from a shift away from historical reliance on fossil fuels.
Under Communities LEAP, DOE matches selected communities with technical
assistance providers who assist them with bringing their clean-energy
planning and economic development vision to life.
The West Fresno County C-LEAP cohort 2 is part of 30 communities that were
selected to have technical assistance from a national laboratory, in this
case LLNL. Its focus will be clean-energy planning and development, carbon
capture and storage. It is led by a non-profit from the Central Valley, the
Socio-Environmental and Education Network (SEEN), which has worked with west
Fresno County disadvantaged communities since 2016 on STEM education,
environmental justice and climate resilience. It also involves the
participation of community leaders and Firebaugh former mayor and current
council member Felipe Perez and Mendota mayor Victor Martinez. (SEEN members
are lead authors of California’s 4th Assessment for the San Joaquin Valley
Region).
Read More
A 2D MARBL simulation of the N210808 “Burning Plasma” shot performed at
the National Ignition Facility at the onset of ignition. This calculation
consists of 19 million high-order quadrature points and ran on El Capitan
predecessor system rzAdams (on AMD MI300A GPUs). Animation by Rob Rieben.
… Accelerating toward El Capitan
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-team-multi-physics-simulations-el.html
Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have achieved a
milestone in accelerating and adding features to complex multi-physics
simulations run on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), a development that could
advance high-performance computing and engineering.
As LLNL readies for El Capitan, the National Nuclear Security
Administration’s first exascale supercomputer, the team’s efforts have
centered around the development of MARBL, a next-generation multi-physics
code, for GPUs. El Capitan is based on AMD’s cutting-edge MI300A
Accelerated Processing Units (APUs), which combines Central Processing Units
(CPUs) with GPUs and high-bandwidth memory into a single package, allowing
for more efficient resource sharing.
El Capitan’s heterogeneous (CPU/GPU) computing architecture, along with
expectations that most future supercomputers will be heterogeneous, made it
imperative that multi-physics codes like MARBL — which targets
mission-relevant high-energy-density (HED) physics like those involved in
inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments and stockpile stewardship
applications — could perform efficiently across a wide variety of
architectures, researchers said.
Read More
https://techxplore.com/news/2024-04-team-multi-physics-simulations-el.html
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Administration.
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