Job Cuts in NNSA

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The National Nuclear Safety Administration [NNSA] has announced that in the next decade, one in five jobs at two of their New Mexico national laboratories will be cut.   The NNSA has developed a plan to reduce the size and scope of the nuclear weapons complex for a post-Cold War world.  In theory, the plan ensures the survival of Los Alamos and Sandia by elmininating redundancies.

Most of the jobs would be lost through normal attrition or transfer to other priorities, like nonproliferation, or counterterrorism, said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino.

How does this affect HPC?  Sandia will retain its Cray Red Storm supercomputer, but will not receive a new machine to rival that of RoadRunner at LANL or the BlueGene at Livermore.  Sandia will be expected to integrate its computing capability with the NNSA laboratories.

We’ll still have a strong high-performance computing presence,” said Sandia spokesman Michael Padilla. He said the NNSA plan is consistent with the labs’ evolving national security mission.

This is terribly interesting [and somewhat alarming] considering the recent awards of significant computing capability in the DoE [here, here].

Read the full article here.