If you’re in business, your computational problems probably range from issues such as how much it’s going to cost to build a product to what’s the fastest, least expensive way to get the product from Juarez to Wichita. Not to minimize these issues, but Mark Seager’s computational challenges are in a whole different realm.

Seager leads the development team for high-performance computing platforms at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. One of his projects involves atomic simulation of shockless compression—which sounds complicated, and undoubtedly is. In layman’s terms, it’s a study of how copper or aluminum reacts to an impact when it’s in the form of metallic foam. This has implications in aerospace and manufacturing, especially as it relates to cooling of compact electronics, cryogenic tanks and lightweight optics filters.

Welcome to a typical day at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, Calif., one of the nation’s key applied science laboratories within the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The federal government funded 10 projects for LLNL last year, relating to topics as varied and perplexing as molecular dynamics (simulating protein membranes) to seismic analysis (simulating underground explosions for oil exploration) to atmospheric chemistry (constructing a climate model for the entire planet).

Not surprisingly, LLNL doesn’t order servers from the same distributors other businesses do. In fact, its computing resources far outstrip what most businesses will ever deal with. To tackle some of the challenges associated with deploying such extensive resources, Seager embarked last year on a unique program to expand computing power while decreasing its cost.