Ada in Nuclear Fusion Research at the National Ignition Facility

or

How Does a Really Big Laser Hit a Very Small Target?

Victor Giddings

Objective Interface Systems, Inc.

Disclaimer

• This presentation is extracted from publicly available material provided by the National Ignition Facility

• It is not a product of and has not been reviewed by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory or the NIF project

National Ignition Facility

• Will contain a very big laser– 192 beams each with a path 510 meters

– 1.8 megajoules

– 500 terawatt

– 351 nm wavelength

• Focused on a very small target – 600 µm diameter volume

– 108 K

– 1011 atmospheres

National Ignition Facility

• Missions– Stockpile Stewardship Program (DoE)– Inertial Confinement Fusion– High-energy-density research

• DoE facility– At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory– In conjunction with Sandia National Laboratory

Inertial Confinement Fusion

National Ignition Facility

NIF in a Nut Shell

• Start with nano Joule coherent pulse• Split it 192 ways• Multiply each by 1013 while maintaining

– Spatial– Spectral and– Temporal characteristics

• Recombine– 600 µm diameter volume– With 50 µm accuracy

Some Technical Challenges

• Largest laser ever built– Beam line components of sizes never built– Component count, diagnostic requirement

• Housed in very large clean room– Entire facility - class 10,000 clean room– Optics and 8,000 square foot optical assembly

building –class 100

Beam Line

Beam Line Schematic

Beam Line ComponentsLaser Glass

Beam Line Componentspotassium dihydrogen

phosphate (KDP) electro-optical crystals

Status

• Conventional construction nearly completed• Over 1500 tons of beam path infrastructure

installed• Expect first laser test by end of year – to

switch yard entry• 2004: “First light” – four beams to target

chamber center – first experiments start• 2008: Full complement of 192 beams

Construction

• Target Chamber Assembly

• Laser Bay – part I

• Laser Bay – part II

• Laser Bay – utility spine

Note: Internet access required for hyperlinks above

Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS)

• 300 Front-End Processors of 18 types• + Supervisor Systems• 60,000 controls

– 45,000 device control points – e.g., stepping motors, transient digitizers, calorimeters, photodiodes.

– 14,000 industrial controls – e.g., vacuum, argon, synthetic air, and safety interlocks

• Around the clock operation

ICCS Hardware Technologies

• Front end processors– PowerPC or UltraSPARC processors– MVE or PCI bus cages

• Supervisory servers– SPARC Solaris

• Consoles – SPARC Solaris

• Network– Ethernet – ATM for 10 Hz video multicast from 1 of 500 cameras

ICCS Services• Machine Configuration

– Allocated to front-end devices– No real-time critical traffic on network

• Archiving • Graphical User Interface• Monitoring• Event Logging• Scripting• Alert Management• Access Control

ICCS Common Framework

ICCS Subsystems

ICCS Framework

• Framework templates define the architecture for each type of process in ICCS:– Supervisory Shot Control Processes– Supervisory Status and Control Processes– Front End Processors– Graphical User Interfaces

• Frameworks also provide utility services:– Configuration– Messaging (Events, Alerts, Logging)– Status Monitoring– Reservation– Archiving– Sequence Control

ICCS Software Technologies

• Ada (Apex) for – Front End Processes– Supervisory Processes

• Java for User Interface• CORBA for Distributed Objects

– ORBexpress for Ada– Visibroker for Java

• UML for design – Rational Rose

CORBA Usage

• 300 CORBA IDL classes – 150 device– 50 framework– 100 supervisor

• 100,000 instances– 60,000 reflecting control points– 40,000 for supervisory or user interface

reflections, summaries, policies, or controls

ICCS Status

• Anticipate about 1M sloc– 350K slot developed

• Incremental and iterative build cycles– 7 cycles completed to date

• Delivery to Front End Integration System Test lab– 5 of the 10 supervisory subsystems – 7 of 16 FEPs.

Credits

• Moses, E. I., “The National Ignition Facility: Status And Plans For Laser Fusion And High-Energy-Eensity Experimental Studies”, ICALEPCS 2001

• Lagin, L. J., et al, “Overview of the National Ignition Facility Distributed Computer Control System”, ICALEPCS 2001

• Carey, R. W., et al, “Large-scale Corba-distributed Software Framework For Nif Controls”, ICALEPCS 2001

• Woodruff, J. P., et al, “QUALITY CONTROL, TESTING AND DEPLOYMENT RESULTS IN NIF ICCS”, ICALEPCS 2001

• Most pictures and all movies from NIF web site: http://www.llnl.gov/nif/nif.html

Further Information

• National Ignition Facility - http://www.llnl.gov/nif/nif.html

• International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems (ICALEPCS) 2001 conference proceedings - http://www.slac.stanford.edu/econf/C011127/program.html