LAB REPORT

It’s a long way to the top, but Lawrence Livermore’s El Capitan is the top dog when it comes to being the fastest supercomputer in the world.

Verified at 1.742 exaFLOPs (1.742 quintillion calculations per second) on the High Performance Linpack — the standard benchmark used by the Top500 organization to evaluate supercomputing performance — El Capitan is the fastest computing system ever benchmarked. The system has a total peak performance of 2.79 exaFLOPs. The Top500 list was released at the 2024 Supercomputing Conference (SC24) in Atlanta.

The system was built by the Lab, along with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD, for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which will use it to model and simulate capabilities for nuclear weapons, helping to ensure the agency doesn’t need to actually test the aging nuclear system.

A fusion reactor promises almost limitless energy — if we can build it. Physicist Tammy Ma of Lawrence Livermore explains how her team achieved fusion ignition, a crucial milestone powered by the world’s largest laser. She was featured in NPR’s TED Radio Hour from a talk she did earlier this year.

Ma leads the Inertial Fusion Energy Initiative at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where she develops ways to harness the power of nuclear fusion through the use of the world’s most energetic laser system. She was a member of the team at the National Ignition Facility that achieved fusion ignition in December 2022 — an experiment that, for the first time in history, released more energy than it consumed.

“Fusion is one of the most fundamental reactions of the universe that makes life possible here on Earth and is responsible for almost everything in the world around us,” Ma said

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design — three broad subject areas that are collectively shaping our world. But a TED conference is broader still, showcasing important research and ideas from all disciplines and exploring how they connect.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is exploring the use of advanced 3D printing to mass-produce fuel capsules for fusion energy power plants.

While the ignition experiment, which the Lab has already achieved in 2022, was a major breakthrough, producing fusion energy on a commercial scale presents significant challenges.

One of the biggest hurdles is the production of fuel capsules required for the process. These capsules hold the deuterium and tritium fuel used in fusion reactions.

These capsules, which must be nearly perfectly spherical, currently take months to manufacture. For reference, a viable power plant would require nearly a million of these capsules per day. Moreover, these capsules must be manufactured with extreme accuracy.

To address this challenge, LLNL has launched a research project to develop 3D-printed fuel capsules.

Electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection is a significant concern in the chemical and electronics industries. In electronics, ESD often causes integrated circuit failures due to rapid voltage and current discharges from charged objects, such as human fingers or tools.

With the help of 3D printing techniques, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are “packaging” electronics with printable elastomeric silicone foams to provide both mechanical and electrical protection of sensitive components. Without suitable protection, substantial equipment and component failures may occur, leading to increased costs and potential workplace injuries.

2D printing is a rapidly growing manufacturing method that enables the production of cellular foams with customizable pore architectures to achieve compressive mechanical properties that can be tailored to minimize permanent deformation by evenly distributing stress throughout the printed architecture.

Impact features on Venus may have been staring us in the face all along

That’s the message from a team of planetary scientists, who have explained Venus’ apparent dearth of large craters by discovering that impacts could have produced the mysterious “tesserae” formations on the Venusian surface.

Tesserae are large — sometimes continent-size — expanses of terrain that have been deformed and covered with wrinkle ridges, which make the landforms look like sheets of corrugated iron. They are formed by lava welling up to the surface, where it cools and hardens, while denser material left in the mantle below a tessera forms a plateau made from a substance called residuum. Sometimes that residuum can be swept away by the flowing mantle around it, allowing the tessera to sink back down to surface level. Now, a team of planetary scientists consisting of Ivan López at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Evan Bjonnes of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Vicki Hansen of Arizona's Planetary Science Institute, has connected these tesserae regions with impacts.

The team focused on a 1,500-km-wide (900 miles) Venusian tessera called Haastte-baad, and applied modeling to radar maps of the tessera (we can’t see Venus’ surface features directly because of the planet's thick, obscuring atmosphere) to try and better understand how it formed, factoring in how conditions on Venus were different in the distant past. In particular, Venus’ crust, called the lithosphere, was much thinner then than it is today. On modern Venus, the lithosphere is a chunky 112 km (70 miles) thick, but billions of years ago, when the interior of Venus was hotter, the solid lithosphere was only about 10 km (6 miles) thick.

The LLNL Report will take a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. It will return Dec. 6, 2024.