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National Ignition Facility Utilizes Oracle® Database 11g in Search for
Nuclear Fusion
World’s Largest Laser to Produce Petabytes of Data and Images through Large
Scale Experiments
Redwood Shores, CA – October 14, 2008
News Facts
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The National Ignition Facility & Photon Science (NIF) at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory uses Oracle Database 11g and its unique
features for managing, storing and analyzing massive amounts of data
and images resulting from the facility’s large scale experiments on
thermonuclear fusion, Oracle announced today.
NIF is the world’s largest laser featuring 192 intense laser beams. When
fully operational in 2009, NIF will direct nearly two million joules of
ultraviolet laser energy in billionth-of-a-second pulses to the target
chamber center. When that energy hits its millimeter-sized targets, it can
generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees and pressure
more than 100 billion times Earth’s atmosphere; conditions similar to those
in the stars and the cores of giant planets or in nuclear weapons.
NIF’s laser beams will replicate the extreme conditions needed to achieve
not only fusion ignition and burn, but also energy gain – two key
milestones in the scientific pursuit of fusion energy as a source of
electricity. If successful, NIF will be the first facility to demonstrate both
phenomena in a laboratory setting.
Fusion, nuclear fission and solar energy (including biofuels) are the only
energy sources capable of satisfying the Earth's need for power for the
next century and beyond without the negative environmental impacts of
fossil fuels.
NIF relies on a foundation of Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Real
Application Clusters, Oracle Automatic Storage Management, Oracle
Clusterware, Oracle Partitioning, and Oracle SecureFiles running on a
cluster of HP blade servers to help meet the stringent performance levels
required to support its experiments as well as facility operations. NIF’s
database stores and manages all of their data spanning large image files
to experiment data to planning and budgeting data to operational
information.
Oracle Database 11g supports NIF’s laser control system which allows
NIF scientists to adjust the settings of the laser and target to their exact
specifications prior to their experiments, and then captures the rush of
data following the experiments. Thirty minutes following an experiment,
the resulting large high-resolution images and data are stored in the
database in their native formats using Oracle SecureFiles, and an initial
analysis has been conducted to provide scientists with an overview of their
experiment results.
With NIF’s experiments generating about 29-30 million rows of data daily
and expected to generate about a petabyte of data per year, Oracle
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Partitioning is used to help scientists quickly query and analyze data
stored in the database.
Following the initial analysis of their experiments, NIF scientists conduct
subsequent analyses of their experimental data to help them understand
what transpired and what actions to take in follow up experiments.
Oracle Data Guard is also used by NIF to backup their production
database in the event of a disaster as well as for producing copies of
production data to be accessed by ad hoc queries or tools.
Looking forward, NIF is considering the data mining and semantic Web
capabilities of Oracle Database to help better understand the meaning of
the data produced in their experiments as well as the relationship between
all the data collected by NIF.
Supporting Quote
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“A challenge we faced was managing the data following an experiment,”
said Tim Frazier, Senior Software Architect, National Ignition Facility &
Photon Science. “The data comes in so fast that we couldn’t keep up with
it in the past. With the implementation of Oracle Database 11g and the
use of the SecureFiles feature, we’ve experienced a dramatic
performance increase in how fast we can ingest data that is generated
when an experiment is run.”
Supporting Resources
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Listen to Oracle Database Podcasts
Download a free, evaluation version of Oracle Database 11g
Terms, conditions and restrictions apply.
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Contact Info
Eloy Ontiveros
Oracle
+1.650.607.6458
[email protected]
Kristin Reeves
Blanc & Otus for Oracle
+1.415.856.5145
[email protected]
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