BSC will host a new high-performance computing hub to speed up the development of fusion electricity

The BSC Advancing Computing Hub will be located in the new BSC building at Barcelona.

The EUROfusion consortium will invest a total of € 59.8 million in nineteen research projects in their Work Plan 2021-2025 to strengthen understanding and predicting of fusion processes in the European fusion programme. One of these projects will benefit from the expertise at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to improve the computational conditions for fusion energy.

Prior to this EUROfusion investment, BSC already holds two reference HPC performance groups in Europe, i.e. the PRACE High-Level Support Team (HLST) and the Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP CoE). The new EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub (ACH) will become the third one. The PRACE HLST, POP CoE and BSC Fusion group members played a key role in building the winning proposal, thus making BSC one of the three reference European teams in HPC performance for fusion. The BSC ACH will include 8 full-time team members with secured funds until 2025.

EUROfusion is the largest consortium of fusion researchers in the world. Together, its 30 member institutes and 150 affiliated universities and companies from 25 European Union member states plus the United Kingdom, Switzerland and Ukraine, work to advance the field by executing scientific research and technological development along the European Research Roadmap to the Realisation of Fusion Energy.

The nineteen projects are divided into fourteen research projects and five ACH. The ACH will be computing centres of excellence in specific fields of scientific modelling. Feeding into the ACHs are Theory, Simulation, Validation and Verification tasks (TSVV) that perform fundamental research and channel science and engineering breakthroughs into standards for EUROfusion software development. All these activities are driven by the fusion R&D community and are supported by industrial partners through hardware being made available.

Barcelona Supercomputing Center has been awarded with one of these ACH that will offer advanced simulation to scientists across Europe. Mervi Mantsinen, ICREA research professor and leader of the BSC Fusion group, will be the principal investigator of this ACH in Spain. The center started its operations at the beginning of July 2021.

In its meeting on March 3rd, the General Assembly of EUROfusion selected the five winning ACH proposals based on the advice from the E-TASC Scientific Board and from five independent experts from outside EUROfusion. All ACH will receive a total investment of € 15.4 million, of which € 9.8 million comes from the consortium members.

The full list of awarded ACH is:

  • CIEMAT (ES) – principal investigator Mervi Mantsinen
  • EPFL (CH) – principal investigator Paolo Ricci
  • IPPLM (PL) – principal investigator Marcin Plociennik
  • MPG (DE) – principal investigator Roman Hatzky
  • VTT (FI) – principal investigator Fredric Granberg

These centers will play an important role in the European Union target to generate electricity from fusion energy by 2050 at the latest. To do that, the EUROfusion consortium before aims to commission a DEMO power plant as early as 2040.

Source: EUROfusion

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