The National Ignition Facility: Status of the Integrated Computer Control System

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), currently under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is a stadium-sized facility containing a 192-beam, 1.8-Megajoule, 500-Terawatt, ultraviolet laser system together with a 10-meter diameter target chamber with room for nearly 100 experimental diagnostics. When completed, NIF will be the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental system, providing an international center to study inertial confinement fusion and the physics of matter at extreme energy densities and pressures. NIF's 192 energetic laser beams will compress fusion targets to conditions required for thermonuclear burn, liberating more energy than required to initiate the fusion reactions. Laser hardware is modularized into line replaceable units such as deformable mirrors, amplifiers, and multi-function sensor packages that are operated by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS). ICCS is a layered architecture of 300 front-end processors attached to nearly 60,000 control points and coordinated by supervisor subsystems in the main control room. The functional subsystems--beam control including automatic beam alignment and wavefront correction, laser pulse generation and pre-amplification, diagnostics, pulse power, and timing--implement automated shot control, archive data, and support the actions of fourteen operators at graphic consoles. Object-oriented software development uses a mixed language environment of Ada (for functional controls)more » and Java (for user interface and database backend). The ICCS distributed software framework uses CORBA to communicate between languages and processors. ICCS software is approximately three quarters complete with over 750 thousand source lines of code having undergone off-line verification tests and deployed to the facility. NIF has entered the first phases of its laser commissioning program. NIF's highest 3{omega} single laser beam performance is 10.4 kJ, equivalent to 2 MJ for a fully activated NIF, exceeding the NIF energy point design of 1.8 MJ. In July 2003, 26.5 kJ of infrared light per beam was produced. NIF has now demonstrated the highest energy 1{Omega}, 2{Omega}, and 3{Omega} beamlines in the world. NIF's target experimental systems are also being installed in preparation for experiments to begin in late 2003. This talk will provide a detailed look at the initial deployment of the control system and the results of recent laser commissioning shots.« less