LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
After each target shot at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), scientists require data analysis within 30 minutes from ~50 diagnostic instrument systems. To meet this goal, NIF engineers created the Shot Data Analysis (SDA) Engine based on the Oracle Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) platform. While this provided for a very powerful and flexible analysis product, it still required engineers conversant in software development practices in order to create the configurations executed by the SDA engine. As more and more diagnostics were developed and the demand for analysis increased, the development staff was not able to keep pace. To solve this problem, the Data Systems team took the approach of creating a database table based scripting language that allows users to define an analysis configuration of inputs, input the data into standard processing algorithms and then store the outputs in a database. The creation of the Data Driven Engine (DDE) has substantially decreased the development time for new analysis and simplified maintenance of existing configurations. The architecture and functionality of the Data Driven Engine will be presented along with examples.
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
An experiment on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) may produce hundreds of gigabytes of target diagnostic data. Raw and analyzed data are accumulated into the NIF Archive database. The Shot Data Systems team provides alternatives for accessing data including a web-based data visualization tool, a virtual file system for programmatic data access, a macro language for data integration, and a Wiki to support collaboration. The data visualization application in particular adapts dashboard user-interface design patterns popularized by the business intelligence software community. The dashboard canvas provides the ability to rapidly assemble tailored views of data directly from the NIF archive. This design has proven capable of satisfying most new visualization requirements in near real-time. The separate file system and macro feature-set support direct data access from a scientist’s computer using scientific languages such as IDL, Matlab and Mathematica. Underlying all these capabilities is a shared set of web services that provide APIs and transformation routines to the NIF Archive. The overall software architecture will be presented with an emphasis on data visualization.
LLNL, Livermore, California, USA
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the most energetic laser system in the world. During a NIF laser shot, a 20-ns ultraviolet laser pulse is split into 192 separate beams, amplified, and directed to a millimeter-sized target at the center of a 10-m target chamber. To achieve the goals of studying energy science, basic science, and national security, NIF laser shot performance is being optimized around key metrics such as implosion shape and fuel mix. These metrics are accurately quantified after each laser shot using automated signal and image processing routines to analyze raw data from over 50 specialized diagnostics that measure x-ray, optical and nuclear phenomena. Each diagnostic’s analysis is comprised of a series of inverse problems, timing analysis, and specialized processing. This talk will review the framework for general diagnostic analysis, give examples of specific algorithms used, and review the diagnostic analysis team’s recent accomplishments. The automated diagnostic analysis for x-ray, optical, and nuclear diagnostics provides accurate key performance metrics and enables NIF to achieve its goals.
