Sandia National Labs Uses JWAVE™ to Help Determine Status of the Nuclear Weapons Stockpile

The Company
Sandia National Laboratories, located in Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif, are part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories. The lab located in Albuquerque employs approximately 6,200 workers and is responsible for a variety of missions, including nuclear weapons stockpile management. It's the job of these Sandia employees to make sure that the U.S. government's nuclear weapons are safe, reliable and available.

The Situation
Bill Swartz is the manager of information technologies and data modeling in Albuquerque. Swartz's organization is chartered with providing applications to Sandia's approximately 3,000 engineers to equip them to do their various jobs as effectively as possible.

Swartz's group was responsible for developing a new application for the stockpile surveillance organization to enable safe, effective testing and thorough analysis of the weapons stockpile. Group members were using Web-based technology and needed an analysis package that would enable them to accurately determine the reliability of the weapons by analyzing all the data associated with the stockpile surveillance testing program.

The Challenge
The data analysis system in place at Sandia was inadequate and difficult to use. The user interface was cumbersome and the software itself was unable to handle all of the data analysis. Consequently, engineers were required to manually extract data and process it on their own PCs. This process was frustrating and very time-consuming. The team began a search for a more sophisticated analysis and visualization package that could be used in conjunction with the group's intranet and also the most recent technologies, including JavaTM and HTML.

The Solution
Sandia chose Visual Numerics' Java-based JWAVE software. Visual Numerics provides industry-leading, mission-critical software solutions to more than 500,000 business and technical professionals around the world. Scientists, researchers, educators, engineers, developers, intranet managers, testers and analysts use Visual Numerics' decision support tools to solve problems, identify trends and share results.

During a commercial product analysis, several software packages were evaluated. According to Swartz, "We determined that JWAVE was the most robust and cost-effective solution on the market."

The Results
"JWAVE has proven to be a very capable software package and has met all of our requirements," comments Swartz. "We do trend analysis, linear and multiple regression curve fitting, X-Y basic scatter plots and bar charts using JWAVE, and have been very satisfied with JWAVE's performance. We have found the user interface to be very intuitive and easy to use, and we are able to integrate the graphical outputs into our common operating environment - Windows® NTTM. JWAVE also enables us to utilize Web-based technologies, which is important for the work we do." Finally, he adds, "One of the most important benefits we've derived from JWAVE is a huge time savings in performing data analysis. What used to take a week to accomplish, now can be done in minutes using JWAVE. We look forward to using JWAVE in many future applications."