Industry
Profiles
Los
Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos
National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in
1943 as Project Y of the Manhattan Engineering District. Under the leadership
of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Laboratory developed the world’s first
atomic bomb. Today, Los Alamos is a multidisciplinary, multiprogram
laboratory whose central mission still revolves around national security.
Managed since its beginning by the University of California, where
Oppenheimer was a professor, Los Alamos continues a commitment to maintaining
a tradition of free inquiry and debate, which is essential to any scientific
undertaking. Located on the Pajarito Plateau about 35 miles northwest
of Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico, Los Alamos is one of twenty-eight
Department of Energy laboratories across the country.
The Laboratory’s original mission to design, develop, and test nuclear
weapons has broadened and evolved as technologies, U.S. priorities,
and the world community have changed. Today, we use the core technical
competencies developed for defense and civilian programs to carry out
both our national security responsibilities and our broadly based programs
in energy, nuclear safeguards, biomedical science, environmental protection
and cleanup, computational science, materials science, and other basic
sciences. The capabilities resident in these programs are increasingly
being used in partnership with industrial firms to bring Laboratory-developed
technology to the assistance of the overall competitiveness of the U.S.
economy.
The Laboratory fills an intermediate role between academic research
and industrial production that helps expedite the development and commercialization
of emerging technologies. In all our programs, we continue to maintain
an intellectual environment that is open to new ideas. In addition,
we are committed to ensuring that all our activities are designed to
protect employees, the public, and the environment.
To accomplish these varied and challenging programs, the Laboratory
relies on technical staff from across the United States. Approximately
one-third of the technical staff members are physicists, one-fourth
are engineers, one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists, and
the remainder work in mathematics and computational science, biological
science, geoscience, and other disciplines. Professional scientists
and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific
projects. Our staff collaborates with universities and industry in both
basic and applied research to develop resources for the future.
The Laboratory covers more than 43 square miles of mesas and canyons
in northern New Mexico. As the largest institution and the largest employer
in the area, the Laboratory has approximately 6,800 University of California
employees plus approximately 2,800 contractor personnel. Our annual
budget is approximately $1.2 billion.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California
for the U.S. Department of Energy.
Los Alamos offers one of the most powerful scientific computing capabilities
in the world. Los Alamos’ Central Computing Facility houses a wide variety
of supercomputers that process huge volumes of information at tremendous
speeds, interlinked to work jointly on scientific problems. The Laboratory
Data Communications Center is the newest part of the computing facility
that houses Los Alamos’ most powerful machines.
The Laboratory also leads in the development of data management and
visualization tools. Through the Department of Energy’s Accelerated
Strategic Computing Initiative, Los Alamos intends to increase its computing
capacity, now estimated at more than one trillion calculations per second,
or one teraflops, to 100 teraflops by 2004. At the same time, the Laboratory
is focusing more efforts on how best to use computer modeling and simulation
for predictive purposes.
Los Alamos’ computing power was developed originally for its defense
mission, but increasingly is used to solve problems vital to the national
economy and global security. The challenges of working with massive
amounts of data present increasing opportunities to solve heretofore
insoluble problems. On the defense side, these problems include combating
threats of proliferation, terrorism and information warfare; tracking
nuclear materials from dismantled weapons; and creating archives of
nuclear weapons test data. On the civilian side, they include following
the spread of HIV, flu and other viruses; creating comprehensive models
of global climate to help predict future carbon dioxide impacts; simulating
the spread of wildfires in real time; and modeling urban transportation
systems to reduce congestion and pollution. Los Alamos computer scientists
have helped the federal government reduce fraud and error in Medicare
and income taxes. They work with the private sector as well: helping
the oil industry analyze seismic data to improve oil recovery from existing
wells; the automobile industry to increase the efficiency of internal
combustion engines; and the financial industry to reduce credit card
fraud.
Before World War II, scientific research primarily relied on experimental
and analytical techniques. During the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos
developed new numerical techniques that were needed to enter the unexplored
territory of computational physics. An early supercomputer, “MANIAC,”
was built at Los Alamos in the early 1950s, based on the ideas of computer
genius John von Neumann. Over the years, Los Alamos has supported and
advanced the efforts of commercial companies such as Silicon Graphics/Cray
Research and IBM. The first Cray supercomputer ever manufactured was
installed at Los Alamos in 1976 and subsequent Cray machines were improved
based on the lessons learned here.
Los Alamos’ Advanced Computing Laboratory, which houses supercomputers
and work stations in an environment open to industrial and academic
partners, serves as a catalyst for innovative, interdisciplinary computer
experimentation.
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