Commentary

Marcus Worsley

Staff scientist in the Advanced Materials Synthesis group of the Physical and Life Sciences Principal Directorate

Celebrating Livermore’s Record of Innovation

Serving as scientific editor of Science & Technology Review has given me the opportunity to learn more about the breadth and depth of Laboratory research. As I developed topics for the magazine, the magazine’s production team and I worked to showcase the range of Livermore’s capabilities, including new advances in materials science, additive manufacturing, and high-performance computing (HPC). Livermore’s HPC expertise is recognized across the Laboratory and the broader Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory complex. As a scientist studying materials for energy storage devices, I have participated in and led research teams that have regularly leveraged Livermore’s HPC capabilities to simulate how different materials and component designs respond under varying conditions, enabling us to determine the most suitable option for a particular energy storage need. Beyond the national security enterprise, recognition of Livermore’s stellar HPC capabilities has reached industry and commercial audiences through R&D World’s annual R&D 100 awards.

For industry and DOE national laboratories, the R&D 100 awards acknowledge innovative effort and technological solutions that have broad commercial and societal impacts. In 2022, I was fortunate to be part of a Livermore research team that won an R&D 100 award. Knowing that we are solving problems in both the national security enterprise and in wider commercial markets makes this award meaningful for its recipients and for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Since the awards began more than 60 years ago, Livermore has won 179 R&D 100 awards. This issue’s feature article, “The Laboratory’s Habit of Innovation,” presents Livermore’s continued track record of excellence in research, particularly in HPC.

R&D World recognized Livermore and its partners for their HPC innovations with three 2023 R&D 100 awards in the Software–Services category. The first, Livermore’s compressed floating point (ZFP) data compression project, combines improved means of compressing data with user accessibility. ZFP allows supercomputers to speed up data transfer—the dominant cost in HPC—and reduce storage requirements. The second Livermore winner, Variorum, enables users to more easily monitor and moderate any computing systems’ temperature, energy, frequency, and power usage, regardless of vendor. The Variorum interface simplifies software optimization and manages energy efficiency. For the third award, Livermore researchers within a multi-institutional consortium applied machine-learning capabilities to cancer research. As part of the Cancer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) project, Livermore developed artificial intelligence models to find relationships between large data sets to solve cancer-specific drug challenges and understand patient treatment outcomes. Livermore’s inputs to the CANDLE project have applications for COVID-19 and other drug therapies as well.

This issue’s highlights demonstrate Livermore’s continued trend of innovation. The first highlight features a technology as a 2023 R&D 100 award finalist for its advances in fabricating drift step recovery diodes (DSRD) in semiconductors using a process called epitaxy. This process dramatically reduces the time and costs needed to fabricate DSRDs. The second highlight showcases another 2023 R&D 100 award finalist, the Pulse-Based Ultra High Frequency Communications System (PB-UHF). PB-UHF is a technology co-developed by Livermore and partners that uses wireless data transmission across reinforced barriers to monitor nuclear reactor facilities. By using high-frequency nanosecond pulses to transmit images and video through normally impenetrable barriers, this technology makes monitoring of nuclear facilities easier. The final highlight provides an update on a past R&D 100 award winner, the Scalable Checkpoint/Restart (SCR) framework 2.0. Since winning an R&D 100 award in 2019, SCR has undergone updates to better support Livermore’s forthcoming El Capitan exascale computing system, which is expected to be the fastest supercomputer in the world when it comes online in 2024.

I am delighted to close my tenure as scientific editor for Science & Technology Review by sharing the inspiring and innovative solutions that Livermore researchers are achieving. I look forward to the new accomplishments the Laboratory has in store.