Friday, October 17, 2014

Fusion Will Be A Huge Clean-Energy Breakthrough, Says National Ignition Facility CIO

By Tim Frazier, CIO for National Ignition Facility and for Photon Science Principal Associate Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once. 
—Albert Einstein.


When it comes to scientific research, sometimes the biggest obstacle of them all is time.

fusion--nif
That’s because, as Dr. Einstein implies, time is linear. Everything doesn’t happen all at once: It takes time to conduct the research, plan the experiments, and analyze the findings that lead to scientific breakthroughs.
At the National Ignition Facility (NIF), we recently announced our own scientific breakthrough in our quest for Ignition, which is energy gain from a controlled nuclear fusion reaction. The breakthrough came when our scientists were able to create more energy from a fusion reaction than was deposited into the hydrogen fuel we used in the experiment.


But It Took Time 
As the Chief Information Officer, it’s my team’s responsibility to help expedite those breakthroughs—by maximizing the time our scientists spend doing science.

This means finding the right technology and infrastructure to give them more time to work on their research and spend less time waiting to access their data. By enhancing our IT infrastructure, we’ve found better ways to reduce downtime and even help contribute to the research at the NIF.
Our goal is that we become even more efficient, using cloud technology to become a worldwide facility, with research data that can be accessed globally.


Giving Time Back To Science
The greatest contribution that my team provides our scientists is reliable and fast access to their data. For us, that meant finding ways to practically eliminate downtime.

Maintaining our IT infrastructure requires monthly maintenance outages, but now we can do our own maintenance more efficiently, which typically saves us five hours each month.
That might not seem like much, but when you consider the amount of time involved and the value of that time to our facility and research teams, reclaiming that time from planned downtime is hugely valuable to us. That’s 60 hours a year we can give back to science.
With little or no downtime, we can now allow our scientists to access their data 24/7, which gives them more time to analyze it.
Our technological advancements also enable us to give time back to research in indirect ways. We spend less time managing our infrastructure, which means we have resources that can be freed to contribute to research.
In comparison, we’ve flipped the 80/20-split on its head at the NIF.
By migrating towards a highly virtualized infrastructure, we’re no longer forced to spend the majority of our time managing equipment. We can focus on our core competency—scientific research—not running our IT infrastructure.


The Future Of NIF Could Be In The Cloud
We continuously review and evaluate possible methods for innovating and improving our IT department for the future.

As with my colleagues in the rest of the industry, we’re reviewing cloud computing. Our belief is that cloud, if done right, could transform how we do research at the NIF.
We currently bring in scientists from across the globe to conduct experiments at our facility, which means that their research occurs in one place. Cloud computing, would help us offer data access, securely, from anywhere in the world. It would also help enable collaboration between scientists across the globe. This is already occurring in many other scientific disciplines, like climate research, that use cloud-based platforms such as Google Docs.
This transformation is already underway as we work to change the NIF into a user facility: Our goal is to enable scientists from across the world to not only utilize our experimental facility, but also collaborate on their findings.

The Bottom Line 
Achieving Ignition is a big, audacious goal! Working on its many challenging problems to support our country’s pursuit of the goal is what drives both the NIF scientific team, and also the IT team.


When we achieve that goal, it’ll be a tremendous breakthrough for our teams and for the scientists that started us on this journey, nearly 60 years ago. My IT team and I will continue to play our part, by finding new ways to give time back to science, and accelerate discovery.