In the past experimentation round, Wendelstein 7-X achieved the stellarators’ world record for the fusion product as a result of reaching higher temperatures and densities of the plasma as well as longer pulses. Wendelstein 7-X attained a fusion product of 6·1026 degrees x second per cubic metre which is the world’s stellarator record and gives first confirmation that the optimisation carried out for its design has been successful.
The 45th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics took place in Prague, Czech Republic, from the 2nd to the 6th of July, 2018. It is the largest annual conference in the field organized in Europe. This year the conference attracted a record number of more than 850 registered participants throughout the world. Our group leader Prof. Mervi Mantsinen chaired the magnetic confinement fusion plasma section of the Program Committee.
Our researcher Xavier Sáez gave a plenary talk on “HPC for solving multi-physics problems” at the 6th International Workshop on Numerical Modelling of High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) in Costa de Caparica, Portugal.
Xavier focused his speech on the importance of multi-physics simulations to capture all relevant phenomena to model and simulate complex systems, and the key role of High-Performance Computing (HPC) due to the high computing resources required in those simulations.
The Summit supercomputer hosted at the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has been announced as the fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the TOP500 List.
The IBM Summit system reached a speed of 122.3 petaflops on the High-Performance Linpack benchmark test—the software used to evaluate and rank supercomputers on the TOP500 list. At its theoretical peak, Summit is capable of 200 petaflops (double precision), or 200 quadrillion calculations per second, about eight times more performance than its predecessor Titan.
Science and Research Ministers from Spain and Croatia, Pedro Duque and Blazenka Divjak, have signed a cooperation agreement pushing the candidature of Granada (Spain) for IFMIF-DONES facility.
Spain and Croatia presented initially independent candidatures but they joined their efforts in order to present a common European candidature. IFMIF-DONES aims to study the extreme conditions of fusion materials under energy production and particularly research on irradiation for DEMO operation. The estimated budget for the construction is between 400 and 600 million euros and the construction will take 10 years and it will be operating at least 20 years.
The European Union leads the clean-energy transition, aiming to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions in 2050 by 80-95% from 1990 levels, which means almost decarbonising its energy system. The strategies for this transition were discussed today at the Energy Transition Conference in Barcelona organized jointly by the local UPC Barcelona-Tech University, Fusion for Energy, the Government of Catalonia and the municipalities of Barcelona and Sant Adrià de Besòs.