Summer Research Intern at Lawrence Livermore Nation Lab
This summer I am lucky enough to work at Lawrence Livermore Nation Lab (LLNL) in Livermore California. Livermore is approximately an hour east of San Francisco, and is a nice quaint town known for the lab as well as its wineries. The lab itself is one of the most prestigious national labs in the country, known primarily for housing the National Ignition Facility, the largest laser in the world, as well as Sequoia, one of the most efficient super computers in the world. I have been able to tour both of these while I have been here, and they are both incredible technological achievements.
My position at the lab is working as a student intern a task assigned to me by my mentor, the lab employee who directly hired me for the summer. As a brief overview of my project, I am part of a team attempting to improve the workflow of research related tasks at the lab. This means examining the steps that go into doing a particular experiment, and finding flaws in the methodology quickly when they would usually take a large chunk of time to identify. There are a number of lab employees and other interns working on different aspects of this project. A lot of it involves using machine learning to help a program identify a problem. I was brought on to try and visualize the output of data that these tests give off in order for the machine learning folks and researchers to identify trends that may lead to experimental failure.
A majority of this research has been independent and I have had to identify the best way to go about things myself. My mentor has been great in giving examples of ways we could display this data, but getting all the implementation down has been solely on me. Everything I am doing has been developed through HTML and JavaScript in order to work in a web environment. I am taking advantage of a 2D graphics library called D3.js that is very good at displaying data interactively on the web. I am taking advantage of two plot types, a parallel coordinate plot and a stream graph, and combining them with a 2D physical mesh viewer. It is really interesting work and something I had very little knowledge of beforehand, so I have learned a lot.
LLNL is a very nice place to work and I know many of the lab employees love working here. For me it is very far from home and a completely new environment. I can’t say for sure if I would like to stay with LLNL after I graduate or not, but I am sure either way working here for a summer has really helped me put what I have learned to the test and continued to help me learn more than any experience I have had in the past. Unfortunately, cameras are not permitted of any kind onsite at the lab, so I can’t provide anything cool about the interior. But I do recommend anyone looking for research experience in the following summers to consider LLNL or any government lab doing research related to their interests.