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.
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.
Although we haven’t yet achieved our goal, this was the result of years of research and a significant step toward the goal.
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.
Flipping The 80/20 Split
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.
Most of those I speak with in the IT industry have a rule that they
spend about 80% of their time just managing their infrastructure, but
only 20% of their time contributing to the success of their
organization.
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.
