The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has dedicated a new supercomputing facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California.
The $9.8 million facility houses supercomputing systems that support the agency’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program, a key component of the Stockpile Stewardship Program that certifies the reliability and effectiveness of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without full-scale explosive testing.
The facility is a dual-level building with a 6,000-square-foot machine floor along with support space, LLNL said. “The main computer structure is flexible in design to allow for expansion and the testing of future computer technology advances,” according to a Wednesday press release.
Last October, LLNL announced it had awarded a $39 million subcontract to Silicon Valley-based Penguin Computing to support the NNSA’s ASC program by providing over seven petaflops of computing capability to the Lawrence Livermore, Sandia, and Los Alamos national laboratories.
The NNSA uses supercomputers in its ASC program to simulate nuclear weapons systems, model the behavior and reliability of weapons and their components in different environments, and assess the technical issues of aging weapons in the stockpile.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will extend until Aug. 31, 2016, its contract with Oak Ridge, Tenn.-based Synergy Solutions Inc. (SSI) for personnel security program support, according to a justification and approval notice posted Wednesday.
The contract involves support services involving the agency’s 49,000 contractor and federal employees with security clearances, such as background investigations of cleared employees and applicants. The contract has been extended several times since the initial award in November 2009.
The extension, worth $760,537.94, moves the contract closing date from the end of June to the end of August to give the NNSA more time to award a follow-on contract that month, and will not increase the contract ceiling of $38.8 million, the notice said.
It also said that on June 20, the agency released its intent to issue a contract extension, in part to identify additional sources, but no vendors responded.
