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POWER SYSTEM PROTECTION CRUCIAL TO NUCLEAR SIMULATIONS.

Article Excerpt
Power System Protection Crucial to Nuclear Weapons Test Simulations at Lawrence Livermore Facility Super-computing facility responsible for ensuring the safety of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile seeks assistance in power assurance and reliability.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a pre-eminent scientific resource for U.S. defense, science, and industry, is the institution that applies advanced inter-disciplinary science and technologies to ensure that the nation's nuclear weapons remain safe, secure, and reliable. This is known as the Stockpile Stewardship Program, which entails authentication of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile (a responsibility of LLNL as part of the National Nuclear Security Commission) in support of the comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty.

Scientists and engineers at LLNL use supercomputers to certify weapon performance via simulation rather than actual testing. Because these simulations involve many trillions of computations that perform at ultra high speeds, a new mission was undertaken in the mid-1990s to upgrade these supercomputers to "monster" computer systems that perform at tera scale levels (trillions of calculations per second). The mission resulted in LLNL's recently operational tera scale Simulation Facility (TSF).

Timing of the TSF project...

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