Recent events, research visits and conference participations

2020

On 1 January, José Lorenzo was awarded with a prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project “Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets”. The grant has started on January 1st 2020 and will last three years.
On 16 January, José Lorenzo started in our group as Junior Research Engineer.
On 29 January, BSC hosts the kick-off meeting of the FusionCAT project (2019-2022) on the generation of fusion energy with funding from European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, RIS3CAT.
From 3 to 4 February, Jordi Manyer and Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion MST1 Review Meeting at IPP Garching, Germany.
From 3 to 7 February, Albert Gutierrez participated in the PATC training course on Big Data Analytics at BSC.
From 10 February until June, Eric Planas, a new student who joined the Fusion group, will work on his BSc thesis under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart. His work will consist of the heating analysis of recent record discharges at JET.
From 11 to 13 February, José Lorenzo participated in the EUROfusion DEMO WPMAG Final Meeting, ENEA, Frascati, Italy.
From 12 March until further notice, our group works from home due to Covid-19.
From 24 to 25 March, our group hosted the EPS2020 Programme Committee meeting by videoconference.
On 30 March, we announced together with the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board and the EPS2020 Programme Committee that the EPS2020 conference in Sitges will be postponed by one year due to Covid-19.
On 15 April, Mervi Mantsinen gave a lecture entitled “Ion Cyclotron Resonance Frequency (ICRF) Heating in Fusion Plasmas” by videoconference as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by the Department of Physics on Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain.
On 24 April, the ICREA Memoir 2019 was published, featuring a summary of the activities by our group leader ICREA Prof. Mervi Mantsinen and a scientific highlight of our research results revealing new physics effects in fusion plasmas by three-dimensional computations.
On 14 May, Mervi Mantsinen and Jordi Manyer participated remotely in the EUROfusion WPMST1 Topic 11 experiments on ASDEX Upgrade tokamak, Garching, Germany.
On 18 May, our group leader ICREA Prof. Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “Characterization of first orbit losses by third harmonic ICRF heating of deuterium beam ions on AUG” by videoconference in the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) Monday Morning Meeting, Germany.
On 20 May, we organized a webinar on the DEMO Oriented Neutron Source (DONES) project by Dr Ángel Ibarra (CIEMAT) under the FusionCAT project.
On 11 June, the group was awarded a new research project for “FUSION CODES II” (PID2019-110854RB-I00, 89540 EUR; PI: Mervi Mantsinen) within the State R&D Program Oriented to the Challenges of the Society 2019 in Spain. The grant starts in January 2020 and lasts 3 years.
On 12 June, Mervi Mantsinen participated as an examiner in the defence of the Habilitation Thesis to Supervise Research by Dr David Zarzoso at Aix Marseille University, France. The event took place via videoconference.
On June 15, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “W accumulation and Ti peaking in AUG H mode plasmas with different ICRF heating schemes” by videoconference in the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) Monday Morning Meeting, Germany.
From 15 to 19 June, Mervi Mantsinen, Jordi Manyer and Albert Gutiérrez attended the WPCD Summer Code Camp online.
From 22 June to 30 August, Lara San Martín Suárez, joined the Fusion Group in the annual International Summer HPC Internship Programme. She worked on modelling the heating of fusion plasmas with ICRF waves in a deuterium tritium (D-T) scenario in JET under supervision of Dani Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen.
Throughout the summer, the highschool student Ruth Mora completed her final project within the group, mentored by our team member Jordi Manyer.
On 1 July, Julio Gutiérrez and Francisco Fernández joined our Fusion Group to work on the FusionCAT project.
On 13 July, Eric Planas obtained his degree project after defending his thesis “Modelling and simulation of plasma heating with ICRF waves in JET tokamak”, he obtained cum laude.
On 31 July, Dani Gallart gave guidelines on the strategy of the task he coordinates at JET, T17-07, ICRH strategy for T17-07 (C38).
From 1 September, Mátyás Aradi, a new PhD student who joined the group, will work on the evaluation of Atopic Beam Probe measurements and synthetic diagnostic development in collaboration with the Centre for Energy Research (CER), Budapest, Hungary, under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen
On 1 September, Tomás Bensadon joined the group as a PhD student under Mervi Mantsinen’s supervision. His work will delve into the analysis of ITER performance with different heating schemes using predictive integrated plasma modelling.
On 1 September, Pedro Bonilla started in our group as a researcher within the RIS3CAT FusionCAT project working on multi-physics modelling of fusion applications, in particular in the simulation of ITER’s First Wall heat diffusion.
On 9 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated as the scientific coordinator of M18-05 “ICRH Scenario Support for D and T plasmas” in the experiments on the Joint European Torus (JET), Culham, UK.
On 10 September, Dani Gallart organized and gave a presentation in T17-07, Progress on D-T prediction of C38 high-performance discharges with PION.
On 14 September, the group co-organized a webinar on Faster Fusion through innovations by Dr Mikhaill Gryaznevich (Tokamak Energy) under the FusionCAT project
From 20 to 25 September, José Lorenzo attended the virtual edition of the 31^st Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT2020).
On 2 October, our group together with F4E, b_TEC Foundation and UPC co-organised Barcelona’s session of FuseNet Teacher Day.
On 5 October, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “Characterization of first orbit losses by third harmonic ICRF heating of deuterium beam ions on AUG” by videoconference in the Task Force Meeting of the EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak Campaigns Work Package, Garching, Germany.
On 19 October, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “W accumulation and Ti peaking in AUG H mode plasmas with different ICRF heating schemes” by videoconference in the Task Force Meeting of the EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak Campaigns Work Package, Garching, Germany.
On 21 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in a FusionCAT review meeting with Generalitat de Catalunya.
On 23 October, BSC hosted the Annual Meeting 2020 of the FusionCAT project (2019-2022) on the generation of fusion energy with funding from European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, RIS3CAT.
On 26 October, our group was awarded a new project at the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES project QS-2020-3-0026). RES will provide over 2 million CPU/h for the next 4 months (November 2020 – February 2021), with a likely extension for a second 4-month period (until June 2021). The aim of the project led by Julio Gutiérrez is to set a complete ab-initio description on the structural and electronic properties of defective W structures using the Linear Scaling Density Functional Theory (LS-DFT) methods implemented within the BigDFT code.
From 9 to 10 November, Albert Gutiérrez and Xavier Sáez joined the SC20 supercomputing conference which took place virtually. The conference is promoted and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society
On 6 November and 4 December, Pedro Bonilla and Mervi Mantsinen participated in the FusionCAT exploitation working group meeting.
From 11 to 13 November, Julio Gutiérrez attended the 19^th online USPEX workshop and hands-on tutorial sessions. USPEX is a crystal structure prediction software for designing of new materials, which uses artificial intelligence-based methods like evolutionary structure prediction or particle swarm optimization.
From 23 to 24 November, our 2 Phd students Mátyás Aradi and Tomás Bensadon participated in the 2020 FuseNet PhD Event online, whose programme included the invited talk “European Integrated Modelling (EU-IM), ITER Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite (IMAS) and its high-performance computing applications” by our researcher Jordi Manyer.
On 27 November, our group organised the 1^st Spanish Fusion HPC Workshop under the auspices of RES, with our group leader Mervi Mantsinen (BSC and ICREA) together with Shimpei Futatani (UPC), Edilberto Sanchez (CIEMAT) and Alejandro Soba (CONICET) in the Programme Committee and Rose Gregorio as the local organizer. The workshop was free for all and attracted 183 registrations from all over the world. There were 24 talks in total, of which 3, 10 and 11 were plenary, invited and contributed talks, respectively. A virtual tour to the MareNostrum supercomputer was also offered.
From 30 November to 11 December, Pedro Bonilla attended the Virtual School on Numerical Methods for Parallel CFD organised by Cineca within the PRACE training program.
On 2 and 18 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated in online meetings with the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board to discuss the 47^th EPS Plasma Physics Conference, 21-25 June, 2021. BSC is the local organizer of the event and Mervi Mantsinen is the chair of the local organizing committee.
On 11 December, Mervi Mantsinen was selected to the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board, following the elections that closed on 6 November. The term of service will be four years from summer 2021 to summer 2025, renewable by mutual agreement for a second four-year term.
From 14 to 16 December, José Lorenzo participated in the EUROfusion Work Package Magnets (WPMAG) Annual Meeting that took place virtually. He presented his progress in the EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) “Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets”.
On 23 December, it was announced that the 47^th EPS Plasma Physics Conference, organized by the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board and BSC as the local organizer and Mervi Mantsinen as the chair of the local organizing committee, moves online.

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(2016-2019)