Virtual visit by LLNL Director Kim Budil with HPCAT
Recently, LLNL Director Budil, along with APS-ANL management and DOE federal program managers, held a virtual visit with HPCAT staff and shared words of gratitude and encouragement in the ongoing effort to keep science moving while dealing with impact from the COVID situation. As almost everyone across the globe, HPCAT too has had to evolve and figure out ways to deal with the COVID situation. HPCAT is a large user based facility – with over 750 user visits per year. Due to the COVID impact, HPCAT has been unable to host outside users and had to develop a new “remote” user operations mode. Remote operations mode was/is new in many aspects, from having to figure out how to coordinate large scale shipping-receiving of equipment and all the way to implementing remote computer connection and control of actual experiments. After a brief work pause, due to mandatory shelter in place orders, HPCAT resumed work and was up and running in remote mode by July-2020. Since then, and currently, HPCAT is running at 100% of operational time across all four simultaneously operational experimental stations.