EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub at BSC starts its operations!

Barcelona Supercomputing Center Advanced Computing Hub (ACH @ BSC) has started operating this July. The mission of this hub is to provide computer science, scientific computing and software engineering support for the entire EUROfusion theory/simulation program.

Initially, five simulation codes have been assigned to our ACH to give support to them in 2021-2022: ERO2, STELLA, SPICE-2D, KNOSOS and BLUEMIRA.

The ACH work has started with the kick-off meetings (KOM) of SPICE, ERO2 and STELLA codes. In those meetings, there were nice presentations from the code developers to present the codes and list the needs to be covered by the BSC ACH:

ERO2.

  • It is a code for modeling plasma-wall interaction and global material migration in fusion devices.
  • Needs: Improve parallelization of ERO2.0, e.g. compiler optimization and GPU

STELLA.

  • This is a one-dimensional multi-group radiation hydrodynamics code.
  • Needs: Firstly, performance assessment and optimization. Secondly, High-Performance Computing (HPC) support in Stella test suite development.

SPICE-2D.

  • It is a Particle-In-Cell code designed to investigate the behavior of edge hot plasma near the gaps in divertor plates.
  • Needs: Parallelization of the Poisson solver

Finally, the KOMs concluded with useful discussions to establish the points for successful collaborative work among code developers and ACH members.