Information Science, Computing, Applied Math

This petascale (more than one quadrillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer will help NNSA ensure the safety, security, and effectiveness of the nuclear stockpile while maintaining the moratorium on testing. Cielo is the next-generation capability-class platform, enabling scientists to increase their understanding of complex physics, as well as improve confidence in the predictive capability for stockpile stewardship. In its primary role, Cielo will run the largest and most demanding workloads involving modeling and simulation.

Overview

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Director McMillan on Leadership

At LANL, there is a close coupling of information science with computational science, which seeks to deepen our understanding of a variety of complex systems through the integrated use of physical and mathematical models implemented on high performance computers, and applied mathematics, which focuses on practical problems and uses the formulation and study of mathematical models.

LANL has one of the largest supercomputing centers on the planet, with massive resources for both classified and unclassified scientific simulation, along with world-class computational physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians. The result is a unique and tight integration of theory, modeling, and computational science.

Capabilities

The extensive collaborations that have developed from these areas of scientific endeavor have made LANL a leader in areas such as:

• Computational co-design
• Coupled computational physics applications and simulations at scale
• Data science at scale
• Digital libraries
• Next-generation file systems
• Bioinformatics
• Infectious disease surveillance
• Climate change and energy security
• Smart grids

Research directions

With LANL’s expertise in the use of high performance computing for modeling and simulation of complex physical phenomena and working within the auspices of the Advanced Simulation and Computation (ASC) program, extensive research is done in

• Materials science
• Weapons stockpile stewardship
• Environmental management

Given LANL’s leadership in ocean and sea ice modeling and simulation and roles in a variety of energy-centric programs that require this kind of expertise, there is a coupling of research activities in

• Climate change
• Energy security
• Global security

LANL’s ability to simulate large, complex, nonlinear systems and generate unique insights from extremely large data sets creates advances in threat-reduction activities, such as

• Intelligence analysis
• Cybersecurity
• Nuclear non-proliferation