THCOBA04
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a stadium-sized facility that contains a 192-beam, 1.8-Megajoule, 500-Terawatt, ultraviolet laser system that provides a scientific center to study Inertial Confinement Fusion and matter at extreme energy densities and pressures. An Information Technology (IT) infrastructure consisting of some 2,500 servers, 400 network devices and 700 terabytes of storage provides the foundation for NIF’s Control System & Data Archive. Over the past 36 months, NIF’s infrastructure has been highly consolidated and segmented. This talk discusses the high-level requirements and design principles which guided this effort, the metrics & monitoring tools used to assess the performance and configuration management of the infrastructure, and the processes and procedures used to migrate to a highly virtualized infrastructure. Elements of NIF’s approach that might be applicable at other facilities will be discussed.
