Science 1663

Exceptional Facilities for Exceptional Science

From Terry Wallace

The rich history of Los Alamos National Laboratory is founded on science serving the nation. During World War II, the Laboratory had but a single mission—to perfect an atomic fission bomb. Immediately after the war, Director Norris Bradbury pushed Los Alamos to become a national security laboratory and had the mission diversified to include nuclear rocket propulsion, both fission and fusion nuclear energy, and the very first computational biology. Meeting those challenges required assembling a scientific work force second to none.

However, the scientists were not enough—the mission also required exceptional facilities. One of the first was MANIAC I, Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was an extraordinary, programmable calculation machine that could execute 10,000 instructions per second. Today’s science challenges demand significantly more computational power, and Los Alamos has teamed with IBM to build Roadrunner, a computer that will have sustained speeds of more than a petaflop—1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The most famous, widely used facility at the Laboratory is the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, or lansce, which began in the 1960s as the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. The science pursued at lansce has resulted in thousands of advances in topics ranging from nuclear physics to the behavior of matter at the Earth's core.

This issue of 1663 presents articles on two of the newest Los Alamos facilities: the Dual Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test facility, often simply called DAHRT, and the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, or cint. Both are state-of-the-art, and both are just beginning their journey of discovery. I expect them to be keys to ensuring that the Laboratory's scientific endeavors will have significant positive impacts on our national security.