Terry Wallace, associate director for Science, Technology, and Engineering (PADSTE), had good news for employees about the current Laboratory budget at last Thursday’s all-employee meeting in the Physics Building Auditorium.
“We believe we have some stability this year,” Wallace said about the Laboratory’s budget. Under the current Continuing Resolution, Lab funding through March will remain at last year’s $2.2 billion level. Wallace was cautiously optimistic about finances beyond the continuing resolution as well.
Nevertheless, continuing demands by the National Nuclear Security Administration to change the way business is done at the Laboratory have created myriad challenges and opportunities, Wallace said during the 90-minute presentation to employees.
Wallace postulated that the Laboratory will continue in a transitional period—which began in 2006 with the award of the Lab contract to Los Alamos National Security, LLC—through 2016. During this time, the institution and the NNSA will need to wrestle with issues related to being a “multi-customer Laboratory,” one in which Defense Programs funding becomes augmented by funding from other agencies, and questions about the size and scope of NNSA laboratories in the future.
Regardless of who is elected president in November, the United States will face a number of national security challenges that can be addressed by the Laboratory, Wallace said. Battling acts of terrorism similar to those that occurred on September 11, 2001 continues to be a major concern for the nation, as does protecting America’s information infrastructure. Also this year, we saw the global situation shift from a “unipolar world”—one dominated by a single super-power—to a “multipolar world,” as evidenced by Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Wallace added. Moreover, energy security has emerged as a national priority.
“It’s easy to turn ‘energy security’ into a jingoistic phrase, but it’s an incredible challenge and problem that must be addressed,” said Wallace.
Scientific excellence enables success in a growing mission portfolio, Wallace said. For example, the success of the Roadrunner supercomputer in processing a thousand-trillion calculations per second will allow the Laboratory to create the next generation of predictive models to better understand climate change or the fundamental processes at the heart of a nuclear explosion.
Work at Los Alamos to use tiny magnets to capture images of the human brain has now given antiterrorism experts the ability to detect explosives, a prime example of how Laboratory science evolved into a product that truly makes a difference, Wallace said.
In the arena of energy security, Wallace envisioned the Laboratory making an impact on the world in the field of sustainable nuclear energy, concepts and materials for clean energy and energy storage, and using advanced computing to provide the very best tools for national and global decision makers.
Many of last-year’s successes and current achievements will play a large role in the Laboratory’s future excellence, said Wallace, noting the following:
• Just a year ago the idea of petaflop/s-scale supercomputing might have seemed unattainable, yet the Roadrunner supercomputer is now a reality. Roadrunner’s unclassified machine will be delivered this week.
• The Laboratory has been assured by NNSA that funding for $150 million worth of refurbishments to the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) is in the budget and will proceed.
• An external advisory board found credible mission need for MaRIE—Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes—satisfying a PBI requirement. In the not-too-distant future, MaRIE will help the Laboratory provide new insight into the nature of materials and provide users worldwide with a unique set of tools for materials science.
• The Laboratory has selected Pacific Equity Partners for the state-of-the-art, multipurpose Science Complex. The Science Complex will provide 450,000 square feet of space in which 1,400 employees can perform research in classified and unclassified settings. The highly cost-effective complex has flexible floor space and environmentally advanced construction and operation techniques and is expected to provide a place for powerful scientific collaboration among Laboratory researchers.
“[The Science Complex] is about a facility supported by a number of different programs, and in many ways is the poster child for the future of the Laboratory,” Wallace said.
In closing, Wallace said a focus of the Laboratory will be to refine the Laboratory’s Grand Challenges by fiscal year 2010, continue to use Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) funding to cultivate scientific excellence, and to cultivate the next generation of scientists from the Laboratory’s postdoctoral fellowship program.
Roadrunner, a new hybrid computer moves at petaflop/s speed
World's highest magnetic fields help scientists investigate materials
Monte Carlo code predicts subatomic particle interactions 
