Early in my career I had the pleasure of interning at LLNL (ironically, working on a completely open source compiler project) but I was able to go on a number o

Early in my career I had the pleasure of interning at LLNL (ironically, working on a completely open source compiler project) but I was able to go on a number of tours of NIF. It was extremely cool. They have a whole team of software engineers writing software just to keep all the mirrors calibrated and things like that. In person it is much bigger than it seems in pictures.