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There is always so much going on at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that it’s impossible for us to keep up.
Combing through my inbox and social media, I see a half dozen announcements from LLNL about intriguing accomplishments that we haven’t had a chance to cover in recent weeks – and that’s just the news they want us to hear about … wink.
Of course half the time I barely understand like a quarter of what lab officials are talking about in their press releases, but let me take a shot at a cogent recap. Because it’s important for us to report on the happenings at the compound off East Avenue, considering LLNL (like its neighbor, Sandia National Laboratories) is an economic engine of not only Livermore, but the entire Tri-Valley.
The big news came out the Monday before Thanksgiving, with LLNL joining the 16 other U.S. Department of Energy national labs (and private industry and academia partners) on the Genesis Mission, an effort launched by executive order of President Donald Trump to “transform American science and innovation through the power of artificial intelligence”.
Livermore Lab has been at the forefront of AI innovation, and an integrated AI platform is seen as a critical step toward strengthening national security and solving complex scientific problems, Genesis Mission technical director Brian Spears told Bay City News in an article we picked up from the wire service online before the long holiday weekend.
“At the end of the day, our goal is simple: build a system that learns, adapts and delivers results fast enough to give the U.S. a decisive advantage in science and national security,” said Spears, whose day job is director of the AI Innovation Incubator at LLNL. “This is our opportunity to harness AI, science and computing together to win this race. We have a limited window to act, and we intend to meet it.”
Since that major announcement, LLNL has issued two other press releases about scientific milestones (including one sent just before I started writing this column).
The lab’s National Ignition Facility conducted a first-of-its-kind experiment to “assess the ability of U.S. nuclear weapons to survive encounters with adversary missile defenses and reach their targets” – also a key step in moving weapons modernization forward. Scientists exposed weapons-grade plutonium samples to intense, pulsed thermonuclear neutron radiation in a safe and controlled laboratory setting at NIF, lab officials described.
In another project, LLNL scientists worked with peers at other facilities on a new process to deliver neodymium (a rare earth element essential for powerful permanent magnets that is primarily mined and refined abroad, with China controlling much of the supply chain).
“We hope this method becomes a cornerstone for domestic production of neodymium magnets,” author and LLNL scientist Eunjeong Kim said in a press release. “It can enable a truly U.S.-based ‘mine-to-magnet’ manufacturing chain from rare earth mining and separation to final magnet fabrication, reducing reliance on overseas processing.”
Also in November, LLNL researchers were part of a team that won the coveted 2025 Gordon Bell Prize from the Association of Computing Machinery for their project that developed a real-time tsunami early warning system framework powered by El Capitan – the world’s fastest supercomputer, which resides in Livermore.
El Capitan is now the only show in town, with LLNL announcing on Nov. 6 that its predecessor, the Sierra supercomputer, has been officially retired. “End of an era!” lab officials said in bidding adieu to Sierra. “Thank you for paving the way for the next generation of high-performance computing with El Capitan.”
LLNL leveraged El Capitan to launch a record-breaking protein workflow, in a project with two partner institutions highlighted in a Nov. 14 press release.
“The effort, dubbed ElMerFold, produced high-quality 3D structure predictions for more than 41 million proteins — at a scale and speed previously thought impossible,” lab officials said. “The record-breaking run hit a sustained rate of 2,400 structures per second and peaked at 604 petaflops of performance using 43,200 AMD Instinct™ MI300A Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) and 10,800 nodes of El Capitan.”
Or as translated for the layperson by LLNL computer scientist Brian Van Essen, the project’s principal investigator:
“Doing this kind of AI inference at scale and being able to take a trained model and generate lots of data for distillation — or to explore the design space for bioresilience — is absolutely critical as a capability. And to be able to do it on El Capitan is game-changing, because we can reach scales that you just can’t get anywhere else.”
And earlier this fall, in a story we missed, LLNL Director Kim Budil awarded the 2025 John S. Foster Jr. Medal to Michael R. Anastasio former director at LLNL (2002 to 2006) and at Los Alamos National Laboratory (2006 to 2011).
“Mike Anastasio exemplifies the very best of the national laboratory tradition,” Budil said in a Sept. 30 press release.
“He is known for his dedication to service, extensive technical expertise, visionary leadership, and lasting commitment to developing new leaders,” she added. “Mike has made a profound and lasting impact on the nuclear security community and, especially, the national security laboratories. These qualities have shaped not only the stockpile stewardship program but also the culture of teamwork and excellence that underpins our mission.”
Editor’s note: Jeremy Walsh is the associate publisher and editorial director for the Embarcadero Media Foundation’s East Bay Division. His “What a Week” column is a recurring feature in the Pleasanton Weekly, Livermore Vine and DanvilleSanRamon.com.
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