The $462 million, seven-year MESA project is the engineering and science underpinning for future warhead designs. On time and budget, the Microsystems and Engineering Sciences Applications complex at Sandia in Albuquerque combines systems designers, component designers, and computer visualization researchers to quickly imagine and design key hardware elements. MESA is scheduled to be fully functional in 2008.

Sandia’s pulsed power capabilities, including the powerful Z machine, are used by all of the nation’s nuclear weapons laboratories to understand the fundamental properties of materials critical to nuclear weapon performance. A $60 million refurbishment of the Z machine began in mid-2006.

Sandia participates in the NNSA’s high-performance computing program through the design, acquisition, and use of supercomputers like Sandia’s Red Storm machine. Red Storm is one of the world’s fastest computers. Upon completion of an ongoing upgrade this year, Red Storm will have a theoretical peak performance of 125 trillion floating point operations in a single second. These parallel-processing computers support sophisticated models and simulations, which allow Sandia researchers to understand the effects of environments and aging on various components and subsystems in warhead designs.

Examples of Sandia’s underlying efforts in science and engineering appear throughout the pages of this Annual Report and are identified with the Science Engineering Innovation logo shown here.

Sandia’s LDRD

Sandia’s world-class science, technology, and engineering define the Labs‘ value to the nation. Because U.S. security depends on it, Sandia strives to keep its capabilities on the cutting edge.

Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program provides the flexibility to invest in long-term, high-risk, and potentially high-payoff research that stretches the Labs‘ science and technology capabilities.

LDRD supports Sandia’s primary strategic business objectives: nuclear weapons; energy resources and nonproliferation; defense systems and assessments; and homeland security and defense. LDRD also promotes creative and innovative research by funding projects that are discretionary, short-term, and often high-risk, attracting exceptional research talent from across many disciplines.