Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services to integrate artificial intelligence into the operations of the National Ignition Facility, a center for laser-based fusion research.
The AI integration project aims to solve anomalies in real time to ensure the reliability of mission-critical operations while easing growing operational demands, and enhance efficiency, improve responsiveness and support NIF operations into the 2040s and beyond, LLNL said.
While the laboratory already uses AI for various tasks, the new initiative advances AI adoption further by developing an AI-driven troubleshooting and reliability system.
Semantic Search Capabilities
The project is currently in the first phase, with AWS providing its latest generative AI services, featuring intelligent search, summarized large-language-model response and Retrieval-Augmented Generation chatbot functionality using AmazonSageMaker.
Deploying advanced semantic search capabilities across 22 years of operational history, comprising over 98,000 archived problem logs, helped staff resolve issues rapidly and keep experiments on track, said NIF Operations Manager Bruno Van Wonterghem, noting that the facility has been executing approximately 350 high-energy-density physics experiments annually.
The implementation of AWS’s generative AI capabilities is seen as a model for adopting the technology at other national laboratories.
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