Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory



Nick Williams, a retired engineer who works with Livermore’s Fun with Science Program, received top honors in the written category of the Flame Challenge, a global science contest run by the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University and the actor and science aficionado Alan Alda. The contest asks scientists to explain complex scientific principles in terms that a 5th-grade student could understand.

Hundreds of scientists from around the world submitted answers to the 2013 challenge: What is time? Nearly 20,000 students participated in judging the submissions.


Lawrence Postdoctoral Fellow Frederico Fiuza received a 2013 Advanced Scientific Computing Research Leadership Computing Challenge Award for his proposal, “Predictive Full-Scale Simulations of Fast Ignition of Fusion Targets.” The award will provide 19.5 million hours of computational time on Mira, the IBM Blue Gene/Q computer at Argonne National Laboratory’s Leadership Computing Facility. Mira has 786,432 cores and achieved 8.59 quadrillion floating-point operations per second on the Linpack benchmark. It is ranked No. 5 on the current list of top 500 supercomputers. Fiuza, who works in Livermore’s Physical and Life Sciences Directorate, will use this award to perform complex, multiscale modeling of the fast-ignition process.