Two Students on their internship in the Fusion group

Paolo Settembri on the left and Eoin Kearney on the right posing with the project cover image in the middle.

Hello! As part of the Summer of HPC project ‘Computational atomic-scale modelling of materials for fusion reactors organised by PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) we, Eoin Kearney (from the Erastova group, University of Edinburgh) and Paolo Settembri (University of L’Aquila), joined the fusion group of the Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC) in the months of July and August. It was a great opportunity, and we’d like to share our experiences of the summer and working with the group.

We were supervised by Julio Gutiérrez Moreno and the group leader Mervi Mantsinen. They were a great help and really supportive throughout our project. As the project was online due to the pandemic it would have been easy to become disconnected, but they helped us feel welcome in the group. Being part of group meetings also helped us feel part of everything.

Now below we’ll give you an introduction to our projects and how the summer went.

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Fusion group members attend the International Workshop of High-Temperature Superconductors

Source: htsmod2020.

Our team members Oriol Fernández and José Lorenzo attended the 7th International Workshop on Numerical Modelling of High-Temperature Superconductors from 22nd to 23rd June. The event was planned to be held in Nancy, France, in 2020 but due to the current pandemic situation it had to be postponed and finally took place remotely in 2021.

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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.

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Our collaborative EU-Japan HPC simulation project on large-scale ab-initio modelling of Tungsten

Atomistic structure of self-interstitial defect in bulk tungsten. Background image from JFRS-1 supercomputer, adapted from source (www.iferc.org)

We are glad to announce that a joint EU-Japan HPC project led by the BSC Fusion Group’s researcher Julio Gutiérrez has been recently granted 350K node-h (14,000,000 core-h). The project will run over one year on the Japan Fusion Reactor Simulator (JFRS-1), located at the Computational Simulation Centre of the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC-CSC) in Rokkasho (Aomori, Japan).

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Join us! We are looking for new group members for numerical modelling in fusion

We are looking for researchers in computational physics, computers science, engineering or related fields to join our Fusion group (fusion.bsc.es) at the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) of Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The objective of our group is to enhance modelling capabilities in fusion by code development, validation, integration and optimization including the use of advanced HPC techniques.

We work closely towards the objectives of EUROfusion (www.euro-fusion.org), the European fusion research programme for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, in collaboration with Fusion for Energy (F4E), ITER, International Tokamak Physics Activity, and the Spanish national fusion laboratory CIEMAT. Given the number of projects we are involved in, we have the possibility to match our project needs and the candidate interests and profile when deciding on the tasks to be carried out.

Please check here for more details and for a link to send in your application.

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