Fusion Group

4th Fusion HPC Workshop

December 4, 2023

On 29 and 30 November 2023, the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) actively participated in the yearly workshop regarding research in HPC for Fusion, which has now arrived at its 4^th edition.

The Workshop is meant to be a gathering appointment for experts in HPC in the research field of Nuclear Fusion. The covered topics were related to the different ways in which HPC methods and algorithms, spanning across Monte-Carlo methods, Neural Networks, and Parallelization Exploitation, can be extremely valuable for applications, going from the simulation of MHD instabilities to System Analysis, to reach efficient ways of energy production through Nuclear Fusion.

A total of 31 talks have been organized in 11 Zoom Sessions, giving life to an exhaustive program covering all the relevant topics. The 5 keynote talks, of great inspiration for the audience, were:

We are looking for engineers interested in high-performance computing sciences

November 22, 2023November 22, 2023

Our task is to help generate efficient simulations in HPC environments

We are looking for Research Engineers in Scientific Computing to join the growing team of the EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)

The successful candidates will participate in cutting-edge European R&D activities related to the optimization and programming of codes devoted to simulation-based plasma physics science and fusion technology. They will become members of this reference performance group in an international working environment.

FuseNet Teacher Day 2023

October 16, 2023

The FuseNet Teacher Day is an annual event organized by FuseNet which closes the gap between research/industry and high school education. Its main purpose is to motivate students in the rich field of fusion physics and technology. It is typically addressed to professors, who receive a nice set of educational material and a gentle overview of fusion technology on the shoulders of the main research labs in each European country.

We are happy at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to organize together with Fusion for Energy (F4E) the Catalan session, as done in previous editions (see here). This year the session has been covered by Dr Ferran Albajar (F4E) and Dr Dani Gallart (BSC). The Catalan session, which typically lasts 1 hour, is entirely devoted to the understanding of the key features and advantages that fusion technology has to offer. We also elaborate on the educational materials available and after that we engage in an interesting and enthusiastic discussion with all the audience. We appreciate the interest and the time that professors invest in our talk, and we hope all the material and motivation we try to send during the session is useful and ultimately transferred to the students. The students are the future of our society and so, of fusion technology as well.

Research stay at ITER

August 21, 2023August 22, 2023

From the 10^th of April to the 13^th of May, one of the members of our Fusion group, Tomas Bensadon, went on a research stay to the ITER Organization (IO) Headquarters in Cadarache, France. The research stay took place as an internship, under the 2022- INTERN-SCOP06- ICRH modelling in various scenarios of the ITER Research Plan program. This internship was made possible by the BSC Mobility Program, which was awarded to Tomas Bensadon on August 2022.

DIII-D National Fusion Facility Achieves Historic 1,600-Hour Research Campaign

July 12, 2023

A worker inside the vessel at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility (source: General Atomics)

The DIII-D National Fusion Facility, located in San Diego, California, is the largest magnetic fusion research facility in the United States and is operated by General Atomics for the US Department of Energy. This facility plays an important role in optimizing the tokamak approach to fusion energy production since the mid-1980s and provides valuable data for the engineering design phase of ITER.

DIII-D has recently been in the news because has completed a two-year research campaign that resulted in a record-breaking 1,600 hours of plasma research and 140 groundbreaking studies, leading to many transformative advancements for delivering cost-effective fusion energy.

Disseminating our research in Fusion at the 16a Festa de la Ciència

June 19, 2023June 22, 2023

On Saturday, June 10, took place the 16a Festa de la ciència in the Rambla of Prim of Barcelona. More than 6000 assistants came to this science dissemination event organized by the Ajuntament of Barcelona and counted with 176 activities and engaged more than 150 city entities related to science and dissemination. As last year, our Fusion Group participated to disseminate Fusion technology among the event participants.