We are pleased to announce that our group has been awarded a new project at the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES). 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) making a total of 4,397,000 CPU/h. We will use the RES top-quality resources in MareNostrum 4, equipped with 165,888 Intel Xeon Platinum 8160 cores, 2.10GHz with Intel Omni-Path.
The FusionCAT Annual Meeting 2020 took place today, and it counted with the participation of almost 40 researchers from different backgrounds, institutions and expertise. The main development areas of the project were explained and the current status of the ongoing research was presented. Comments, questions and constructive criticism were exchanged during the discussions, helping reach the overall conclusion that the FusionCAT project is progressing well and according to schedule. Each of the groups in the consortium achieved the technical objectives that were agreed upon, and, at the same time, participated in creating an active nuclear fusion community in Catalunya.
The first-ever edition of FuseNet Teacher’s Day, a Europe-wide webinar dedicated to promoting Fusion in high-schools, was held last Friday, October the 2nd. The event brought together teachers from all around Europe, scattered into 18 local sessions across 16 European Countries. Our BSC Fusion group, in cooperation with Fusion for Energy (F4E), the b_TEC Foundation and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), organized the Barcelona local session under the umbrella of the FusionCAT project.
Our team member José Lorenzo attended the 31st edition of the Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT2020) that was held virtually last week. The event was organized by the Ruđer Bošković Institute (IRB), the largest Croatian research institute in natural sciences and technology. In normal circumstances SOFT 2020 would have taken place in Dubrovnik, Croatia, but due to the COVID-19 pandemics the organizing committee decided to run the event virtually. As explained by the Chair of the International Organizing Committee Dr Tonci Tadic, “delaying or postponing SOFT 2020 was not an option due to the fast development of fusion research and the exciting decade of fusion successes ahead of us”.
The RF Topical Conference is held every two years by a different host. Last year it took place at Hefei, China. From our Fusion Group Dr Dani Gallart had the chance to participate to the event; you can read more about his experience in this earlier post.
The RF Topical Conference tackles several radio-frequency topics in plasmas such as: experiments, modelling, interactions of wave and plasma edge and other related subjects. Recently, the conference contributions from the 2019 edition have been published in the AIP Conference Proceedings and are in open-access. The Fusion Group has contributed to a total of 6 papers which are briefly described in the following:
On September 14th, our Fusion Group had the pleasure to organize the second FusionCAT webinar together with BSC as the FusionCAT project coordinator.
The webinar given by Dr Mikhail Gryaznevich, Chief Scientist at Tokamak Energy Ltd was entitled Faster Fusion through Innovations and it was attended by 53 participants from diverse nationalities and backgrounds. The discussion delved into the increasingly significant role of private funded fusion research and the particular scientific innovations of Tokamak Energy.