SEDONA is the first portable nerve agent detector, automatically screening container contents for nerve agent in 8 seconds (ten times faster than available technology). The combination of advanced permanent magnet technology, probe and electronics design, and unique spectral fingerprinting of nerve agents enables SEDONA to be portable, accurate, and rapid. SEDONA dramatically reduces the likelihood of a successful nerve agent attack at airports and other venues.
LANL team: Michelle Espy, Michael Janicke, Derrick Kaseman, Per Magnelind, Ryszard Michalczyk, Pulak Nath, Scarlett Paisner, Jurgen Schmidt, Algis Urbaitis, Robert Williams, Jacob Yoder
Smart Microbial Cell Technology is an ultra‐high‐throughput biocatalyst screening platform that alleviates the bioengineering testing bottleneck, finds efficient and useful biocatalysts, and delivers optimized custom biocatalysts, accelerating biocatalyst discovery and essential industrial applications like pharmaceuticals and renewable energy. Smart Microbial Cell Technology is a significant breakthrough in biocatalyst discovery, engineering, and evolution, with benefits that will ripple across society.
LANL team: Taraka Dale, Ramesh Jha, and Charlie Strauss
A high-performance simulation software framework enabling flexible infrastructure for environmental systems modeling across scales. Runtime control gives users the power to customize simulations and to combine and add new processes much faster than traditional simulation systems. Amanzi–ATS has been used to analyze pristine local watersheds, effects of wildfire damage on watersheds, subsurface contaminant transport at legacy waste sites, and the effect of a warming climate on the Arctic tundra.
Multi-institution team of LANL (Charles Abolt, Adam Atchley, James Beisman, Katrina Bennett, Markus Berndt, Quan Bui, Michael Buksas, Neil Carlson, Rao Garimella, Vitaliy Gyrya, Dylan Robert Harp, Eugene Kikinzon, Konstantin Lipnikov, Daniel Livingston, Julien Loiseau, Zhiming Lu, Terry Ann Miller, J. David Moulton, John Ortiz, Alexis Perry-Holby, Lori Pritchett-Sheats, Daniil Svyatsky, Alec Thomas, Svetlana Tokareva), Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Legion is the only data-centric programming system that removes task scheduling and data movement hurdles by automating those processes, furthering progress toward realizing exascale. Legion enables up to 10-fold improved performance, speed, and scalability for supercomputing applications in machine learning, materials science, and life and physical science. Legion is the only data-centric programming system that offers this level of automation through use of a single programming language. The program has been used on many of the world’s top supercomputers, and more applications are turning to Legion as they look to scale.
Multi-institution team of LANL (Irina Demeshko, Jonathan Graham, Pat McCormick, Nirmal Prajapati, Galen Shipman, Wei Wu), NVIDIA University of California–Davis, Sandia National Laboratories, Stanford University, SLAC, and National Accelerator Laboratory
LANL’s Multi-burn Solid Rocket enables multiple independently controllable impulses from a single solid rocket aboard low-cost small satellites while maintaining rideshare compatibility. These impulses will maintain high thrust for rapid orbit change maneuvers and continue to provide the safety, simplicity, reliability, scalability, and long-term storage compatibility of traditional solid rockets, accomplishing this required innovation in every major component of a heritage technology.
LANL team: Eva Baca, Kavitha Chintam, Malakai Coblentz, Nicholas Dallmann, Bo Folks, David Hemsing, Mitchell Hoffmann, Lee Holguin, Joseph Lichthardt, Alan Novak, Kassidy Shedd, Ian Shelburne, Bryce Tappan, Jacob Valdez, and Mahlon Wilson
Robust and radiation-hardened for space applications, the OrganiCam payload is a multi-use instrument: reconnaissance for organics on other solar system bodies, confirming instruments entering space are sterile, analyzing samples returned to Earth, and detecting ppb-level organics in “clean” environments. OrganiCam obtains real-time fluorescence images showing the locations of biological materials among luminescent minerals in a geological context. It is a robust, portable, simple, and low-power instrument developed using over 50 years of space instrument application development experience.
Multi-institution team of LANL (Sam Clegg, Magdalena Dale, Kumkum Ganguly, Patrick Gasda, Steve Love, Tony Nelson, Raymond Newell, Logan Ott, Heather Quinn, Adriana Reyes-Newell, Benigno Sandoval, Roger Wiens) and University of Hawai’i
QUIC-Fire is the first laptop-capable, real-time wildland fire prediction software to explicitly model a fire’s two-way interaction with the atmosphere and 3D heterogeneous vegetation, transforming the ability to assess risk, optimize fuel treatments, and plan prescribed burns. With QUIC-Fire, practitioners can quickly model how a fire will spread in situations previously impossible without a supercomputer by capturing critical influences of 3D vegetation structure, interactions between multiple fires, variable winds, and complex topography at meter-scale resolutions.
Multi-institution team of LANL (Sara Brambilla, Michael Brown, Alexandra Jonko, Alexander Josephson, Rod Linn, Richard Middleton, David Robinson) and U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service Tall Timbers Research Station
CIERRA is the first and only software that routinely identifies the most extraordinary and unpredictable type of lightning–megaflashes providing unprecedented quality data for further research. At the forefront of extreme lightning research, CIERRA improves environmental hazard awareness by issuing rapid notifications when a storm starts generating megaflashes, enhancing public safety, weather, and wildfire predictions.
Michael Peterson (LANL) and University of Maryland