August 29, 2014
Lawrence Livermore National Lab
I accompanied Bill Tucker, interim vice president for research, to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to discuss how we can strengthen UC’s working relationship with the lab. Bill was focused on their tech transfer practices and partner relationships with industry, and I was especially interested in their high-performance computing capabilities (HPC). LLNL is known for its massive computing scale, ability to expand to next-generation architectures, and cybersecurity expertise. LLNL and UC have been associated for a long time, and the relationships among the researchers run very deep. LLNL CIO Doug East and Fred Streitz, head of high-performance computing, have opened a dialog with several campuses to utilize the HPC clusters outside the lab’s firewalls. We also toured the National Ignition Facility, which is an amazing piece of hardware that enables scientists to work on creating stars in the laboratory through nuclear fusion. Just another example of the amazing science going on across UC that blows your mind.