Director’s message

High-performance computing (HPC) is integral to the success of Sandia National Laboratories, now and in the future. With the arrival of the tri-lab “El Capitan” computer located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory next year, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will enter the Exascale era with computers that make one quintillion calculations per second and let researchers solve problems that once seemed beyond reach.

Sandia is a world leader in HPC, developing solutions to the most sweeping and critical challenges our country faces. In this HPC Annual Report, you’ll see our researchers using supercomputers in mission areas including nuclear stockpile stewardship, hypersonics, machine learning, energy, material design, and more. HPC is instrumental in Sandia’s nuclear deterrence work. It helps us understand how materials respond to harsh, rapidly changing environments and ensures that weapons will perform as intended, which is essential to national security.

The forces behind our HPC breakthroughs are advanced physics and engineering simulation codes developed at Sandia that let our scientists and engineers deliver accurate, high-fidelity results. We’re developing new algorithms and codes to ensure the potential of next-generation supercomputers is realized.

In this report you will see our advances in foundational meshing software that opened the door to ultra-high-resolution simulations in aerospace, national security, energy, and medicine. You’ll see many other examples of how HPC helps our country. Sandia’s Aerosciences Department used HPC developed under NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing Program to run large-scale calculations of the turbulent flow past re-entry flight vehicles, generating data that will be used in future designs. Our HPC resources contributed to a concentrating solar power receiver using particle technology for low-cost energy generation with thermal energy storage. As we advance our national security concepts to product realization, these tools are an integral part to prototyping through engineering development to qualification and finally sustainment.

With new and emerging challenges, it is critical to continue expanding our computing capabilities and resources to remain on the cutting edge of innovation. Sandia will be a driving force in the decades to come, turning big ideas into reality as we provide exceptional service in the national interest.