HPC4EI

Summary

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Big Ideas Lab – HPC4EI (April 7, 2026)

A Deep Dive Into High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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Episode Overview

This episode of Big Ideas Lab takes listeners inside the pioneering work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, focusing on the High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) program. The central theme is the groundbreaking use of supercomputers and agentic AI to bridge the gap between scientific research and heavy industry, unleashing discoveries that make US manufacturing smarter, greener, and more competitive. The episode features candid discussions with project leads Brandon Wood, Aaron Fisher, and Yeping Hu, offering a behind-the-scenes look at how computational power is transforming real-world manufacturing and national security.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Industry-Science Divide

[00:02–01:37]

• Story Launch: The episode opens with Brandon Wood recounting a telling moment of disconnect while presenting detailed simulations to industry leaders, highlighting a longstanding communications gap.

  • Brandon Wood: "Son, I'll just be honest with you, I have no idea what you're talking about. You're talking about atoms and molecules. I have no idea how this relates to anything." — [01:25]

• Central Problem: For decades, scientists created detailed models, but manufacturers lacked ways to apply those insights directly to urgent, practical problems. Now, national labs and industry are bridging this gap.

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2. HPC4EI: Turning Simulations Into Solutions

[03:35–05:49]

• Mission Statement: The HPC for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) program connects heavy industry with experts at national labs, applying high-performance computing to optimize energy use, reduce waste, and spur global competitiveness.

  • Aaron Fisher explains: "We find people in heavy industry... and we match them with computational physicists across the national laboratories. We help them move the needle on their energy needs and make the businesses more competitive." — [04:37]

• Program Impact: Over 200 projects launched, supporting everything from small startups to major corporations.

• Notable Example:

  • Heat Exchanger AI Optimization:
    • "They basically let an AI system have at the design of this heat exchanger... 20 to 30% more efficient at moving heat... you’d save like 10% of your gas cost [for AC] on a hot day." — Aaron Fisher [05:07–05:49]

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3. Real-World Success Stories & Scope

[06:05–08:12]

• Energy Impact: Small efficiency gains in heavy industry (which uses nearly a third of US energy) have outsized national effects.

• Diverse Problems Tackled:

  • Paper Towels: "Figuring out how to pack more fibers in and make it more absorbent." — Aaron Fisher [07:33]
  • Paint Drying: Simulations led to "30% energy reduction" in auto paint application by optimizing layer thickness. — [08:04]

• Scale: Over 916 million core hours logged, showing both the magnitude and impact of computational resources.

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4. Scientific-Industrial Collaboration Process

[08:46–10:46]

• Complexity: Bridging industrial reality and simulation takes more than technical wizardry; it’s about translating problems between two very different worlds.

  • "You have to bridge that gap... Laboratory environments are controlled; industry is messy, dynamic, unpredictable." — Brandon Wood [08:54]

• Process Breakdown:

  • Step 1: Identify and translate the right industrial question into a computable science question.
    • "Asking the right question is really, really important." — Brandon Wood [10:04]
  • Step 2: Convert this to a simulation, generate and then distill vast data sets into actionable insights.
  • Step 3: Use the results to explore “what if” scenarios rapidly.

• Unexpected Value: Sometimes, simulations reveal the company is pursuing the wrong problem, redirecting R&D before costly mistakes.

  • Solid State Battery Case: "We actually found that the line of inquiry was wrong... it was maybe going to solve one of those problems, but make the other problem much worse." — Brandon Wood [11:36]

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5. Enter Agentic AI: The New Digital Colleagues

[12:45–14:42]

• Demonstration: Brandon Wood and Aaron Fisher roleplay an exchange with an AI agent designed to autonomously optimize battery efficiency:

  • "Interpreting request. Increase efficiency." — Aaron Fisher [13:54]
  • "Reframing goal. Maximize usable energy over lifecycle within thermal and material limits." — Brandon Wood [14:02]
  • "Optimal pathway identified... Life cycle efficiency improved by 11% without instability and agentic AI inflection." — Aaron Fisher [14:18]

• Vision: Every business will soon have AI agents to autonomously test solutions, providing a “digital workforce.”

  • "I think every business is going to have an AI agent." — Brandon Wood [14:41]

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6. Accelerating Discovery: AI & Machine Learning in Industrial Systems

[15:17–18:34]

• AI's Rapid Evolution: Yeping Hu details how machine learning models are now used to accelerate simulations once requiring weeks or months:

  • Glass Manufacturing: The Stargate reduced-order model enables real-time prediction for massive melting tanks, saving "over a million dollars per year and... huge CO2 reduction." — Yeping Hu [18:34]

• Approach: AI models are trained on a handful of data points, then generalized across multiple projects, revolutionizing speed and accessibility.

• Notable Quote:

  • "AI has been involved rapidly... and the capability of AI is increasing at a speed that we can't even imagine." — Yeping Hu [15:17]

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7. National Security Benefits and Advanced Material Research

[19:05–19:54]

• Mutual Benefits: Simulations and code improvements created for industry feed back, strengthening national security computational tools.

  • "We've improved our codes through these projects... that folds back into the national security mission." — Aaron Fisher [19:21]

• Materials Sourcing: New projects are helping to onshore critical materials (e.g., magnesium), boosting national resilience.

  • "For instance, we just started a project focused on producing magnesium here in America... It's an onshoring opportunity." — Aaron Fisher [19:54]

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8. The Big Picture: Building a Culture of Innovation

[20:37–21:38]

• Success is Relationship-Driven: Lasting value comes not just from one-off projects, but in forging sustained connections between labs and industry.

  • "I actually think the biggest metric for success... is the longer lasting relationship of trust and understanding..." — Brandon Wood [20:37]

• Tackling Complexity: The true impact is in giving teams the tools and expertise to tackle problems previously deemed intractable.

  • "Where we're going to see the biggest benefits is... making us able to tackle more complex problems." — Brandon Wood [21:20]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Industry-Science Divide:

  • "Son, I'll just be honest with you, I have no idea what you're talking about." — Anonymous Manufacturer [01:25]

• On the Power of Collaboration:

  • "We're building a US Manufacturing base that is smarter, more agile, and more efficient." — Brandon Wood [06:39]

• On Agentic AI:

  • "Every business is going to have an AI agent... agentic is the destination they're trying to get to." — Brandon Wood [14:41–14:47]

• On Impact and Vision:

  • "It's not just about making things faster. It's making us able to tackle more complex problems." — Brandon Wood [21:20]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamp | |---------------------------------------------|------------| | Science vs. Industry Gap | 00:02–01:37| | HPC4EI Mission & Examples | 03:35–05:49| | Real-World Case Studies & Impact | 06:05–08:12| | Bridging Science to Industry Process | 08:46–10:46| | Simulation as Course Correction | 11:11–12:11| | Agentic AI in Action | 12:45–14:42| | Machine Learning in Heavy Industry | 15:17–18:34| | National Security & Material Sourcing | 19:05–19:54| | Big-Picture Relationships & Expertise | 20:37–21:38|

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Conclusion

This episode showcases the transformative potential of applying the world's most advanced computing and AI to pressing industrial and security challenges. By breaking barriers between science and industry, programs like HPC4EI are not only making manufacturing more efficient but are giving us the tools — and partnerships — to solve previously impossible problems.

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Transcript

[Narrator]

A scientist looks out into a crowd of some of the nation's most influential manufacturers. Their voices lower as he walks to the center of the stage. The cool metal of the podium presses against his palms. Bright lights blaze down, washing the room in white, blurring faces into shadowed silhouettes. His heart hammers in his chest, a steady drum of anticipation. But he knows the material. He's conducted the research, he's run the simulations. He begins his presentation.

[Brandon Wood]

I had done this beautiful, elegant, molecular, detailed simulation and I was talking about the parameters that went into it.

[Narrator]

Everything went exactly as planned. The models worked, the, the results were clear.

[Brandon Wood]

And at the end they're like, okay, we have any questions?

[Narrator]

The audience lights lift and he sees their expressions for the first time.

[Brandon Wood]

There was just this dead silence.

[Narrator]

The scientist awkwardly steps off stage. Not in defeat, in confusion. What just happened? A few moments later, the gap between the world of private industry and scientific inquiry became painfully clear.

[Brandon Wood]

And all of a sudden I hear this guy and he's like, son, I'll just be honest with you, I have no idea what you're talking about. He's like, you're talking about atoms and molecules. I have no idea how this relates to anything.

[Narrator]

For decades, this gap has slowed progress across American industry. Scientists could model the world in extraordinary detail. Manufacturers knew the real world problems, costing them time, energy and money. But connecting those two worlds was its own challenge. Now that divide is starting to break down. Glass manufacturing plants the size of football fields are running more efficiently. Electric vehicle batteries are lasting longer. And paint that once corroded too quickly is being redesigned at the molecular level. This is the work of the High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation program, turning simulations into real world solutions. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab. Your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary pushing pioneers and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow. Today, Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a nuclear facility engineer, systems design and testing engineer and a senior scientific technologist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative mission driven environment. Discover Open [e-mail] careers where big ideas come to life. Every innovation begins with a Can this be better? Across factories and industrial plants, every decision has a time, energy, money. A single misstep can ripple for years. The High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation Program or HPC for EI uses some of the world's most powerful supercomputers to answer that question for private industry by connecting industrial leaders with computational physicists at national laboratories. HPC for EI turns simulations into solutions, helping companies optimize energy, reduce waste, and stay competitive in a global economy. Aaron Fisher directs the initiative.

[Aaron Fisher]

What we do in this program is we find people in heavy industry that uses a lot of energy, uses a lot of resources in the United States, and we match them with computational physics physicists across the national laboratories. We help them move the needle on their energy needs and move the needle on their resource needs and make the businesses more competitive.

[Narrator]

Resources you use every day like AC in your car.

[Aaron Fisher]

There's a company that has been trying to design better heat exchangers for car air conditioners. One of our researchers here at Lawrence Livermore did a project with them to improve the design of their air conditioning. They used a technology called topology optimization. So they basically let an AI system have at the design of this heat exchanger. And it was something like 20 to 30% more efficient at moving heat through the heat exchanger than your sort of classic designs. They estimated that if they got that thing into a car on a hot day, you'd save like 10% of your gas cost for running the air conditioner.

[Narrator]

These partnerships between private industry and national labs are funded by the U.S. department of Energy. As of 2026, DOE National Labs have collaborated with industry on over 200 projects through the HPC for EI program.

[Aaron Fisher]

One of the things the program has been focused on is reducing energy need and energy intensity in industry. If you can go after an industry and shave a couple percent off of the industry, you'll have a huge impact.

[Narrator]

Heavy industry consumes nearly a third of the nation's energy. Even small improvements can ripple across the economy, driving efficiency and keeping American industries competitive on the global stage. Brandon Wood is a project lead within the program. He oversees projects that put this computing power directly into the hands of industry.

[Brandon Wood]

We're building a US Manufacturing base that is smarter, more agile, and more efficient.

[Narrator]

Since launching HPC4, EI has scaled rapidly in both size and scope.

[Brandon Wood]

The bottom line is we're using computing to solve real world problems.

[Aaron Fisher]

We've launched about 200 projects. We've got about 2025 in flight right now. The projects last for about a year. Each project gets a $400,000 budget, which covers the staff at the national laboratory. We work with 12 national laboratories in total. I think we've worked with over 100 different companies at this point. We've worked with really small companies, the startups trying to get a new product off the ground. We've worked with huge, huge companies that actually already do some computational physics, and we help bring them to the next level.

[Narrator]

You can see the results of these computations in your own home.

[Aaron Fisher]

They were modeling the fibers in paper towels, figuring out how to pack more fibers in and make it more observant

[Narrator]

or in your garage.

[Aaron Fisher]

There was one that the program worked with. It was literally a project about watching

[Narrator]

paint dry, not the kind of work you'd expect.

[Aaron Fisher]

What they were doing was painting cars. If you put a thinner layer of paint on the car, you don't have to spend as much energy drying it and you use less paint.

[Narrator]

The results speak for themselves.

[Aaron Fisher]

So it's two years literally simulating paint drying, but they actually managed to make an improvement. It was like 30% energy reduction.

[Narrator]

The supercomputers across all these projects have logged more than 916 million core hours, enough to keep a single laptop running for thousands of years, tackling problems that no one could solve by hand.

[Aaron Fisher]

It's the computers and all the support staff that run the computers and all the people that keep the software going on all the computers, and then all of the scientists that know how to use them. And decades of code development on supercomputers like this. Right? So it's a lot of technology and expertise to leverage.

[Narrator]

Even with these breakthroughs, connecting the worlds of science and industry requires more than technical knowledge.

[Brandon Wood]

I think it does take a special part of the brain to be able to bridge that fundamental. When applied, the expertise is really critical. And that expertise isn't just the ability to run simulations. It's the ability to translate real problems into simulation language. That is the hardest problem is the complexity of real world operation in industrial environments. They're messy, they're dynamic, they're unpredictable. This is not the way we run laboratories, but it's the way industry operates. So we have to bridge that gap

[Narrator]

to manage that complexity. The program follows a clear step by step process to turn intricate industrial challenges into, into solvable simulations.

[Brandon Wood]

The first thing is actually really important, which is figure out which question to ask. And that may sound trivial because you say, well, the problem is provided by the company, but a problem that's provided from an industrial sort of market driven standpoint, how that translates into the types of simulations that we do is its own problem, right? That's its own science question. And so a lot of times there's kind of that initial management of expectations. This is what we can do. This is what your problem is. Let's turn that into a real question.

[Aaron Fisher]

Right?

[Brandon Wood]

And that determines that drives what type of simulation we actually do. In many cases, that's actually harder than running the simulation. Simulation may take time and computing power, but asking the right question is really, really important.

[Narrator]

Once the right question is defined, the simulation can begin.

[Brandon Wood]

We distilled it down to these are the things we can actually compute. Set it up in the computer, run the simulations, and then comes the analysis part. So you get the data out. Sometimes you can translate that very quickly to the original problem of interest a lot of times because it's high performance computing, which means almost every single time you're generating a lot of data, and so distilling also all of that data down to the parts that really matter.

[Narrator]

The computer runs the scenarios, but it's the scientists who interpret the their results.

[Aaron Fisher]

Once they've done that, they have a tool that they can really use to study that process. And then they can start doing things like changing what they want to do. What if we used three burners here instead of two? Or what if we tried a different set of temperatures? They can start asking those what if questions to see how the process evolves without having to do it.

[Narrator]

Sometimes the most important discovery a simulation makes is realizing you're solving the wrong problem. That insight can redirect years of research, saving time, money and resources, while pointing the way to genuine innovation. Inside the automotive industry. One project focused on the future of solid state batteries for electric vehicles.

[Brandon Wood]

They're trying to optimize it, and they were focused on one line of inquiry with their optimization, but they weren't sure if that was the right one. And so we've done a lot of battery simulations and battery material simulations in my group. So we took this on and we started simulating the properties of these systems. And we actually found that that line of inquiry was wrong. It turned out that the direction that they were going was maybe going to solve one of those problems, but make the other problem much worse.

[Narrator]

A digital time machine seeing decades of wasted effort before it even happens, and redirecting research choices to the path that actually leads to results.

[Brandon Wood]

And so they took that and they've been implementing it, going in a new direction. We're actually building on that with a second phase of that project.

[Narrator]

The simulation runs inside a computer, but the systems they represent exist out in the real world, inside factories, inside furnaces, inside machines that operate on a massive scale. So how can a limited number of lab hands can give insight to a seemingly endless number of industry problems. They create new hands, digital hands.

[Yeping Hu]

It will no longer be only human.

[Narrator]

Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a nuclear facility engineer, systems design and testing engineer and a senior scientific technologist along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission driven environment. Discover Open [e-mail] careers where big ideas come to life.

[Brandon Wood]

Okay, where were we? Okay, let's make the battery more efficient using this method.

[Aaron Fisher]

Interpreting request Increase efficiency. We're trying to train what they call agentic AI systems.

[Brandon Wood]

Reframing goal Maximize usable energy over life cycle within thermal and material limits.

[Narrator]

An AI agent is an AI system that can take a goal and work toward it on its own.

[Brandon Wood]

Actually, let's try this.

[Aaron Fisher]

Running constraint simulations.

[Brandon Wood]

Optimal pathway identified.

[Aaron Fisher]

Life cycle efficiency improved by 11% without instability and agentic AI inflection. The world is now awakened to the agentic AI inflection.

[Brandon Wood]

We call it agentic AI can perceive

[Aaron Fisher]

and understand the context of the circumstance

[Narrator]

that every business in the future, just

[Brandon Wood]

like they have an email address and a website, I think every business is

[Narrator]

going to have an AI agent.

[Brandon Wood]

I think every customer I talk to, agentic is the destination they're trying to get to.

[Narrator]

Instead of a scientist guiding every step, the agent can be sent to explore different possibilities, test variables and learn from the results as it goes.

[Aaron Fisher]

And the goal there we could hand them an agent and the code that could make it easier for companies to maybe do some of this work themselves.

[Narrator]

When agentic AI systems are built on top of decades of scientific research from national labs, the implications quickly expand.

[Yeping Hu]

AI has been involved rapidly in the past few years and the capability of AI is increasing at a speed that we can't even imagine.

[Narrator]

Yeping Hu is a project lead for HPC for ei, exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering.

[Yeping Hu]

The HPC projects that I've been involved in. The goal is to help the company to accelerate their simulations.

[Narrator]

AI tools aren't just speeding up routine tasks. They're giving scientists the ability to rethink how complex manufacturing problems are solved, Opening doors to discoveries that were once out of reach. And in heavy industry systems, that power isn't just convenient, it's critical. Nowhere is that more clear than in glass manufacturing. The tanks that hold the molten material can be enormous. At that scale, even the smallest problem can cascade into massive waste, affecting a material.

[Yeping Hu]

The nation depends on the melting tank itself. They wanted to know what's happening inside of it because you can't like see through it and it's really large. So they want to know the flow field inside of this large melting tank. And they want to know because they have several points that they can heat, heat up temperature or heat up the tank. And different combinations of these temperatures would have a huge effect on the flow field. And how the flow field looks like would have a large effect on the final quality of the glass. Currently like what they do is they run a big simulation. As you can imagine, given how large that melting tank is, the simulation could take weeks or months to run for one set of parameters. That take too many times and obviously it costs a lot of money and then also produce a lot of carbon dioxide.

[Narrator]

Instead of running large scale simulations over and over again, the Lawrence Livermore HPC for EI team built an artificial intelligence model to predict the results.

[Yeping Hu]

We help them develop. We call it Stargate model or reduced order model. Basically is a machine learning based model that can do these type of predictions. So given these control parameters, you fit it in through this machine learning model and then it will instantly gives you the predicted flow field of this large melting tank.

[Narrator]

What once required hundreds of simulations can now happen in seconds.

[Yeping Hu]

At the beginning they will provide us with 5, 6 data points and then we will use that to train the model and then test it out and also feed this data into the model that we already developed before, either from the model we use for other projects, or just like the model that we tried on some other toy example simulations. But we do try to use this data and try to use the model that we have and see for example, which model works the best.

[Narrator]

The result is a breakthrough not just in speed, but in real world impact.

[Yeping Hu]

It definitely saved them over like million dollars per year and also huge CO2 reduction. If they further advance the model that we provided and integrated in their manufacturing pipeline, I think that will make an even more huge impact later on.

[Narrator]

The tools that accelerate industrial innovation don't just stay on the factory floor. They also strengthen the technologies and materials our nation relies on every day.

[Aaron Fisher]

We've got these national security laboratories that are participating in this program. And these national security laboratories have put together simulation codes to solve national security problems.

[Narrator]

These are the same codes used to model critical national security systems.

[Aaron Fisher]

It lets us stress test our codes in a way that we haven't been able to before. And in some cases, we've improved our codes through these projects. Those answers aren't quite right. We need to improve this and Add this bit of physics and then that folds back into the national security mission that now they have a better code to solve their problems. And this has happened numerous times in the national security laboratories.

[Narrator]

Beyond codes and simulations, the program is also tackling the materials that keep our industries and our nation running.

[Aaron Fisher]

In addition, we've had a lot of projects that are sort of focused on producing critical materials. For instance, we just started a project that is focused on producing magnesium here in America. We don't produce a lot of our magnesium in America. It's an onshoring opportunity. We're starting to look more at things like that as well.

[Narrator]

Every success strengthens American manufacturing, making factories smarter, more agile and more competitive on the global stage. The world's hardest problems rarely behave like lab experiments. They're messy, interconnected, industrial. But with the right tools and the right collaborations, complexity becomes something we can explore.

[Brandon Wood]

I actually think the biggest metric for success, it's the duration. It's the longer lasting relationship of trust and understanding of what HPC can provide. Beyond that one problem that you focused on for 12 to 24 months. We started the conversation, we built a relationship, we said, this is what computing can do for you. We solved some piece of that problem to the point where they thought this is a new tool, this is a new collaboration, this is, is something we can leverage and we built on that,

[Narrator]

something we can understand and something we can solve. At its core, HPC4EI is developing more than just technology, it's developing expertise.

[Brandon Wood]

I would say it's really navigating complexity that is the most compelling in my mind. And so I think where we're going to see the biggest benefits is not, not actually just in making things faster. I think it's making us able to tackle more complex problems.

[Narrator]

And that is where the greatest potential lies. Not from solving the same problems faster, but from solving problems we once thought were impossible. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the Follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening. Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a senior labor relations advocate, a unified communications engineer and a laser modeling physicist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission driven environment. Discover Open [e-mail] careers where big ideas come to life.