Status of the National Ignition Facility and Control System

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a stadium-sized facility under construction that will contain a 192-beam, 1.8-Megajoule, 500-Terawatt, ultraviolet laser system together with a 10-meter diameter target chamber with room for multiple experimental diagnostics. NIF will be the world's largest and most energetic laser experimental system, providing a scientific center to study inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and matter at extreme energy densities and pressures. NIF's laser beams are designed to compress fusion targets to conditions required for thermonuclear burn, liberating more energy than required to initiate the fusion reactions. NIF is comprised of 24 independent bundles of 8 beams each using laser hardware that is modularized into line replaceable units such as optical assemblies, amplifiers, and multi-function sensor packages containing thousands of adjusting motors and diagnostic points. NIF is operated by the Integrated Computer Control System (ICCS) in an architecture partitioned by bundle and distributed among over 750 front-end processors and supervisory servers. Bundle control system partitions are replicated and commissioned by configuring the control database for each new bundle. NIF's automated control subsystems are built from a common object-oriented software framework based on CORBA distribution that deploys the software across the computer network and achieves interoperation between different languages and target architectures. ICCS software is approximately 80% complete with 1.1 million source lines of code delivered to the facility. NIF has successfully activated, commissioned and utilized the first four laser beams to conduct nearly 400 shots in 2003 and 2004, resulting in high quality data that could not be obtained on any other laser system. This presentation discusses NIF's early light commissioning, the status of the control system implementation and plans to complete installation of the remaining laser bundles on the path to fusion ignition