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The National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world���s most energetic laser, completed a multi-year project for migrating control software platforms from Ada to Java in 2019. Following that work, a technology refresh of NIF���s Digital Video (DVID) systems was identified as the next important step. The DVIDs were facing long-term maintenance risk due to its obsolete Window XP platform, with over 500 computers to be individually upgraded and patched, 24 camera types with a variety of I/O interfaces and proprietary drivers/software with their licensing needs. In this presentation, we discuss how we leveraged the strengths of NIF���s distributed, cross platform architecture and our system migration expertise to migrate the DVID platforms to diskless clients booting off a single purpose-built immutable Linux image, and replacing proprietary camera drivers with open-source drivers. The in-place upgrades with well-defined fallback strategies ensured minimal impact to the continuous 24/7 shot operations. We will also present our strategy for continuous build, test, and release of the Linux OS image to keep up with future security patches and package upgrades., Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2021, Shanghai, China

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world���s largest 192 laser beam system for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) experiments. The NIF���s Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS) team conducts quarterly software releases, with two to three patches in between. Each of these software upgrades consists of deployment, regression testing, and a test shot. All of these are done with the team members inside the NIF control room. In addition, the NIF ICCS database team also performs the Database Installation and Verification Procedure dry run before each software upgrade. This is to anticipate any issue that may arise on the day of the release, prepare a solution for it, and make sure that the database part of the upgrade will be completed within the allotted time slot. This talk is about how the NIF ICCS software teams adapted when the LLNL workforce began working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. These adaptations led to a better and more efficient way of conducting the NIF ICCS software upgrades., Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2021, Shanghai, China

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s largest laser system for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) and High Energy Density (HED) experiments. Design of NIF control system started in the 1990s, incorporating established hardware and software technologies of that era. The architecture of the control system has stood the test of time, successfully scaling up to full 192 laser beam configuration in 2009, and then transitioning to 24x7 operations and sustaining 400 shots annually since 2016. The control system has grown with NIF to add new major capabilities, such as cryogenic layering, a petawatt-class laser, 3D neutron imaging and others. In parallel, with scaling up and efficiency optimizations, the software had to adapt to changes dictated by the fast-paced computer industry. Some of our originally chosen technologies have become obsolete and replaced by new programming languages, frameworks and paradigms. In this talk, we will discuss how the NIF control system has leveraged the strengths of its distributed, cross-platform architecture to successfully modernize "in-place" computing platforms and programming languages without impacting the demanding experiment schedule., Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2019, New York, NY, USA

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 2.1 MJ of 500 TW ultraviolet laser light to a target. NIF experiments facilitate the study of extreme physical conditions at temperatures exceeding 100 million K and 100 billion times atmospheric pressure allowing scientists the ability to generate conditions similar to the center of the sun and explore the physics of planetary interiors, supernovae and thermonuclear burn. This year concludes a series of optimizations and enhancements to the control information systems to sustain the quantity of experimental target shots while developing an enhanced precision diagnostic system to optimize and increase the power and energy capabilities of the facility. In addition, many new system control and diagnostic capabilities have been commissioned to increase the understanding of target performance. This year also concludes a multi-year sustainability project to migrate the control system software to Java. This talk will report on the current status of each of these areas in support of the wide variety of experiments being conducted., Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2019, New York, NY, USA

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 1.8 megajoules and 500-terawatts of ultraviolet light to a target. To aid in NIF control system troubleshooting, the commercial product Splunk was introduced to collate and view system log files collected from 2,600 processes running on 1,800 servers, front-end processors, and embedded controllers. We have since extended Splunk's access into current and historical control system configuration data, as well as experiment setup and results. Leveraging Splunk's built-in data visualization and analytical features, we have built custom tools to gain insight into the operation of the control system and to increase its reliability and integrity. Use cases include predictive analytics for alerting on pending failures, analyzing shot operations critical path to improve operational efficiency, performance monitoring, project management, and in analyzing and monitoring system availability. This talk will cover the various ways we've leveraged Splunk to improve and maintain NIF's integrated control system., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental facility with 192 beams capable of delivering 1.8 megajoules and 500-terawatts of ultraviolet light to a target. Officially commissioned as an operational facility on March 21, 2009, NIF is expected to conduct research experiments thru 2039. The 30-year lifespan of the control system presents several challenges in meeting reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) expectations. As NIF continues to expand on its experimental capabilities, the control system's software base of 3.5 million lines of code grows with most of the legacy software still in operational use. Supporting this software is further complicated by technology life cycles and turnover of senior experienced staff. This talk will present lessons learned and new initiatives related to technology refreshes, risk mitigation, and changes to our software development and test methodology to ensure high control system availability for supporting experiments throughout NIF's lifetime., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

An exhaustive discussion of constraint qualifications (CQ) and stationarity concepts for mathematical programs with equilibrium constraints (MPEC) is presented. It is demonstrated that all but the weakest CQ, Guignard CQ, are too strong for a discussion of MPECs. Therefore, MPEC variants of all the standard CQs are introduced and investigated. A strongly stationary point (which is simply a KKT-point) is seen to be a necessary first order optimality condition only under the strongest CQs, MPEC-LICQ, MPEC-SMFCQ and Guignard CQ. Therefore a whole set of KKT-type conditions is investigated. A simple approach is given to acquire A-stationarity to be a necessary first order condition under MPEC-Guiganrd CQ. Finally, a whole chapter is devoted to investigating M-stationary, among the strongest stationarity concepts, second only to strong stationarity. It is shown to be a necessary first order condition under MPEC-Guignard CQ, the weakest known CQ for MPECs.