Bronis de Supinski
Chief Technology Officer of Livermore Computing
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s mission is grounded in national security, but the impacts of our mission extend beyond any single domain. While supporting deterrence’s scientific and technical foundations, Livermore contributes to the nation’s resilience, preparedness, and economic security by applying world-class science, advanced computing, and trusted partnerships to complex challenges with real-world consequences. The articles in this issue of Science & Technology Review (S&TR) illustrate that impact clearly, showing how the Laboratory’s capabilities translate discovery into practical outcomes that strengthen the nation.
The feature article describes Livermore’s role on the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize–winning team advancing real-time tsunami prediction. Using El Capitan’s unprecedented computing power, together with algorithmic and software advances, Laboratory researchers and their partners developed an early warning framework that combines pressure sensor data with high- fidelity 3D wave simulations to infer earthquake-driven seafloor motion, quantify uncertainty, and forecast tsunami impacts in real time. Central to this achievement was a Bayesian inverse approach, along with a computational strategy that shifts the most demanding wave calculations to an offline phase before an event occurs, dramatically reducing the work required when new data arrive. The Laboratory’s MFEM (Modular Finite Element Methods) library provided a critical foundation, supplying the high-performance numerical techniques and graphics processor– ready software needed to perform these calculations efficiently at scale. The resulting capability offers the potential to improve preparedness and to provide communities and decision makers with better information to protect lives, infrastructure, and regional economies.
This work reflects a key strength of the Laboratory: bringing physics-based modeling, simulation, and computation to bear on problems where complex interactions unfold across large scales and under rapidly changing conditions. At Livermore, these tools are applied to research on earthquakes, the propagation of seismic and ocean waves, atmospheric transport, wildfire spread, and other dynamic phenomena that affect people, infrastructure, and the environment. Our efforts are grounded in a common purpose, to understand the governing physics well enough to build predictive capabilities that are scientifically sound and operationally useful.
This issue of S&TR also includes three highlight articles that demonstrate the Laboratory’s expanded efforts to deliver on its mission. The first highlight introduces Livermore’s work to improve food security through advances in nitrogen fixation for biofertilizers as a means of reducing U.S. reliance on foreign- made fertilizers for crop production. By tailoring biofertilizer strategies to local soil microbiomes and identifying microbial partnerships that enhance nitrogen-fixing activity, researchers are developing approaches that could improve crop growth while supporting more resilient agricultural systems.
The second highlight provides an example of Livermore’s commitment to “Big Science” through its partnership with NASA in the 2026 Pandora space mission. Livermore scientists designed, engineered, assembled, and supported launch of the satellite, which is now collecting data on the atmospheric conditions of exoplanets, with a particular focus on atmospheres dominated by hydrogen or water. The mission serves as a reminder that ambitious science depends on strong partnerships and disciplined execution and that discovery can be pursued in ways that both reduce costs and expand opportunity.
The final highlight examines how Lawrence Livermore helps move innovation outward for broader public benefit. Through the Laboratory’s Innovation and Partnerships Office and its entrepreneurship training programs, researchers are gaining tools to better communicate the value of their work and to build pathways from research to practical use. This effort extends the influence of Livermore’s science and technology, helping ensure that promising ideas reach the communities, markets, and missions that they are well positioned to serve.
Taken together, the stories in this issue reflect the different ways that Livermore’s work has impact. Whether improving hazard prediction, strengthening food systems, advancing space science, or expanding the reach of innovation, the Laboratory is applying its distinctive capabilities to problems that matter. We advance science as a means to deliver practical value for the nation and to meet emerging challenges with rigor, creativity, and purpose.
