End of a Scientific Legend?

pacopico writes to mention the sorry state of the well-known Los Alamos National Laboratory. Sixty years ago, it was at the forefront of the race for the Atomic bomb. Nowadays, "smugness can breed complacency, and complacency carelessness. In recent years the laboratory has been in the news not for its successes but its failures.The result is a change of management, which the story goes on to discuss in great detail. It begs the question - can Los Alamos hang on as a prestigious place or is it too late for the supercomputing powerhouse and weapons lab?"

Comments

Re:It didn't jump; it was pushed

[jd]

The Wen Ho Lee fiasco was stupid, bt (sadly) can be blamed on the Clinton administration. Ultimately, paranoia (regardless of which party is being paranoid) is going to produce stupid, if not insane, consequences.

Los Alamos did an excellent job with LAMPI (their high-performance, highly reliable MPI implementation) and are doing OK with OpenMPI (the multi-vendor replacement), but let's face it, MPI is hardly on the same level as other products they've worked on. I was fairly impressed by their demo of high-performance collective operations at SC|05, but again this is where the LOW-END of an organization like Los Alamos needs to be. The high-end should be solving stuff the rest of humanity hasn't even realized IS a problem.

Science, War, and Profit

[Soong]

I grew up in Los Alamos. My dad worked there over twenty years until he retired. He retired because the culture there had gotten sufficiently unbearable and it wasn't worth putting up with because he could no longer do the kind of science he loved. He wasn't alone among experienced senior researchers there who were fed up and leaving. When the braniest town in the world has a brain drain, there's trouble.

Management by the University of California is possibly the best thing that ever happened to LANL. Whatever the mission given to LANL by DOE, it would be carried out in an academic culture. People were rewarded professionally and looked up to informally for doing good science and good research. Ok, it wasn't all utopia, there was also the petty politicking that goes along with academia and grant groveling. I still think it was good and a lot of good work was done there.

When I moved to California I discovered that some people here objected to the UC management of LANL. They didn't want to be associated with a nuclear weapons lab. I think that's wrong and that they were foolish if they thought that the UC disowning LANL would make it go away. LANL needs the UC because the alternative is too horrible. That has come to pass and now LANL is under joint management of UC and defense contractors. I've heard rumors that the mission changed from far out theoretical, pure and semi-pure research and shifted towards more immediate engineering of new weapons. The new regime is pushing security and secrecy to the point of paranoia and counterproductivity. For many scientists, it isn't fun anymore.

I don't expect LANL to evaporate within the next 5 years. There is still plenty there that doesn't suck. I do expect they'll have trouble replacing talent in some areas. I think it's not yet too late to restore the soul of the place and bring it back and do some world class science.