My experience carrying out an Undergraduate thesis in the BSC Fusion group

I am Eric Planas, and as part of the BSc in Engineering Physics program at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), in February 10th I joined the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in order to carry out my Final Degree Thesis. Now that I am finishing the project and my journey as an undergraduate student is coming to an end, I am writing this post to relate my experience in this group.

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Congratulations to David Zarzoso on his Habilitation thesis in Fusion

Photo: David Zarzoso

Last Friday,  June 12, our group leader ICREA Prof. 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.

Other jury members were Dr Sadruddin Benkadda, Prof. Alain Ghizzo, Dr. Taina Kurki-Suonio, Prof. Jean-Marcelo Rax, Prof. Raúl Sánchez, and Prof. Howard Wilson. The event took place via videoconference due to the present pandemia circumstances with strict social distancing measures which prevented the celebration of this event in person.

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Mark the date! Join us at the European Fusion Teacher Day 2020

Source: FuseNet

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the European agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) and b_TEC Foundation invite all Secondary and High-school teachers to take part in a live webinar, coordinated by the European Fusion Education Network FuseNet, with connections in Catalan and Spanish from Barcelona and English from several spots in Europe on the 2nd of October 2020.

The webinar will aim at giving teachers the tools and knowledge they need in order to introduce fusion in the classrooms. Such state-of-the-art concepts can certainly be hard to introduce into schools, thus we truly think this is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to do it.

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Welcome to MARCONI100, a new tool for fusion research

MARCONI 100 (Photo: CINECA)

MARCONI 100 (M100) is the new accelerated cluster acquired by CINECA, Italy, within PPI4HPC European initiative. MI100 is based on the IBM Power9 architecture with NVIDIA Volta GPUs and has a peak performance of 32 Pflops.

M100 became available in May 2020 to the European public and industrial researchers. In particular, the access to M100 is granted to users with approved projects for this platform (EUROfusion, PRACE, European HPC programs,…). EUROfusion community has 80 dedicated nodes of M100, which means a peak performance of 2.5 Pflops, to run fusion codes and boost the research in this field.

M100 opens the way to the pre-exascale Leonardo Supercomputer expected to be installed in 2021.

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Major milestone reached with the fusion megaproject

Source: ITER.

On May 26, the base of the ITER cryostat was successfully mounted onto its supporting structure in the Tokamak assembly pit. The 1250-tonne component was lifted from it’s mounting frame, carried across the Assembly hall and finally lowered into the pit, culminating a ten-year process to design, manufacture, deliver, assemble and weld one of the most crucial components of the ITER machine.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the most ambitious energy project in the world, bringing together 35 different countries in the effort of producing clean energy for the generations to come. It is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of confinement nuclear fusion and develop the science and technology needed for a future nuclear power plant. After years and years of preparation, the international project officially started in 2007 and has since been building one of the most gargantuan research sites ever envisioned. According to the schedule, the first plasmas are expected in 2025.

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Fusion experiments during the times of COVID-19

View from ASDEX Upgrade Control Room during Covid-19. Source: IPP, Volker Rohde

Our BSC Fusion Group works closely with various experimental fusion devices on the design, preparation, execution, analysis and modelling of new plasma experiments. We are particularly interested in validating and testing our modelling codes against experimental data, and in using our codes for the design of new experiments.

As experimental activities in many fields of science, fusion experiments have been strongly affected by the present COVID-19 outbreak.  

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