Recent events, research visits and conference participations

2025

From February 17 to 21, Ezequiel Goldberg participated in a meeting of the EUROfusion Work Package “Preparation for ITER Operation” (WPPrIO) SP5, “Neutronics, Nuclear waste and Safety”.
On January 21, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the diversity and inclusion working group meeting of the Plasma Physics Division Board of the European Physical Society to prepare for the Women in Plasma Physics Lunch Event at the forthcoming EPS Plasma Physics conference, Vilnius, Lithuania, July, 2025, online.
On January 22, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 6^th Fusion HPC Workshop Programme Committee meeting, online.
From January 28 to 30, Mervi Mantsinen attended the 32^nd European Fusion Programme Workshop in Granada, Spain.
On February 12, Mervi Mantsinen and Irene Agudo, an internship student in our group from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, participated in the Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) Department Open Day 2025, Barcelona, Spain.
On March 6, Dani Gallart participated at the Mobile World Congress 2025 (Barcelona) where he gave a presentation entitled “Alya4Fusion: Towards a Fusion Reactor Digital Twin”.
On March 14, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 36^th Meeting of the IFERC Project Committee in the Broader Approach Activities, online.
From March 17 to 21, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart participated in the 18^th Technical Meeting on Energetic Particles in Magnetic Confinement Systems. Mervi participated in the International Programme Advisory Committee Meeting, and Dani gave an invited talk entitled “Novel method for the detection of alpha heating in JET-ILW DT plasmas” .
On March 21, Mervi Mantsinen participated as a member in the panel meeting to evaluate the nominations for the 2025 EPS-PPCF Sylvie Jacquemot Early Career Prize, online
From March 23 to 25, Mervi Mantsinen, Federico Cipolletta and Dani Gallart participated at the ITER Business Forum (IBF) 2025. They had the chance to explore the industrial ecosystem in fusion technology by holding b2b meetings and showing BSC’s and the Fusion Group relevant work on this field.
On March 27, Mervi Mantsinen participated as an invited member in the panel meeting to evaluate the doctoral theses submitted for the first edition of the Best Doctoral Thesis Award of the GEFP(Grupo Especializado de Física de Plasmas) of the Spanish Royal Physics Society (RSEF), online.
On March 28, Xavier Sáez gave a lecture entitled “HPC codes for Fusion” as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain.
On April 4, Diego Bonato defended his MSc thesis entitled “AI-accelerated solution of Maxwell’s equations for the simulation of high-temperature superconductors dedicated to nuclear fusion” at the University of Padova, Italy. His research was carried out in our group.
From April 7 to 10, Hernán Domingo attended the 51^st IOP Annual Plasma Physics Conference held in London. He was invited to do an oral presentation about Alya4fusion, a project that the Fusion Group is working on to develop a Digital Twin framework for fusion reactors.
From April 7 to 10, Ezequiel Goldberg attended the Fusion Neutronics Meeting 2025: ITER and beyond, where he gave a presentation entitled “Neutron flux in IFMIF-DONES operation room: a comparison between Monte Carlo and deterministic codes.”
On April 8, Federico Cipolletta, Eduardo Cabrera, Augusto Maidana, and Mervi Mantsinen attended the first online session of the Artificial Intelligence Technology Mapping Workshop, organized by F4E.
On April 8 and 26-27 May, several group members attended the F4E IA Technology mapping workshop, online and in person in Barcelona, Spain.
From April 23 to 25, Federico Cipolletta, Daniel Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen attended the 2025 ITER Business Forum (IBF), which was held in Marseille, attending several meetings with representatives from companies in the ITER supply chain.
From May 6 to 8, several group members attended the 12^th BSC Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium. Pau Manyer presented the recent advances he has made in developing the EQUILI module within the Alya4Fusion while Hernán Domingo presented the latest developments in EMWAVE (formerly MAXWEL), a full-wave frequency domain solver that uses FEM. Dani Gallart and Alejandro Soba, contributed to the event as chairman and reviewer, respectively.
From May 12 to 16, Federico Cipolletta attended the 2025-05 JOREK Meeting & annual meeting of TSVV 8, in Naples, where he held a talk titled “Solving generalized eigenvalue problems in J-S and J-C – a preliminary study on possible optimizations”, reporting the recent progress of his work at the BSC-ACH with the JOREK code.
On May 19, the perspective paper entitled “Challenges and opportunities in exascale fusion simulations” by Marta Garcia-Gasulla and Mervi J. Mantsinen was published in Nature Reviews Physics.
From May 19 to 22, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 25^th Topical Conference on Radio-Frequency Power in Plasmas, 2025 and gave an invited talk entitled “40 Years of ICRF Physics on the JET Tokamak: Highlights and Lessons Learned for Future Facilities”.
From May 22 to 23, our group participated in the annual Retreat of BSC’s CASE Department, Altafulla, Spain.
On June 2 and 17, Ezequiel Goldberg participated in the National Fusion Strategy meetings for the Breeding Blankets area.
On June 4, Mervi Mantsinen organized and chaired a Programme Committee meeting for the 6^th Fusion HPC workshop (online event on March 10-11, 2026).
On June 19, our group attended the BSC’s 20th Anniversary Celebration.
From June 24 to July 3, Xavier Sáez, Eduardo Cabrera and Alejandro Soba (team BSCBIT) participated in the virtual CINECA Open Hackathon, organized by CINECA, NVIDIA, and OpenACC, to receive support in porting the BIT1 application to GPUs.
On June 25, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board meeting, online.
On June 27, our group hosted a visit by F4E to the BSC.
From June 30 to July 4, Hernán Domingo participated in the 14^th ITER International School, Marseille, France.
On July 6, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board meeting, Vilnius, Lithuania.
On July 7, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion journal’s Editorial Board Meeting, Vilnius, Lithuania
From July 7 to 11, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 51st EPS Conference on Plasma Physics, Vilnius, Lithuania and presented a poster “Alya4fusion: Advancing plasma equilibrium and electromagnetic wave propagation modelling for fusion reactor simulations”.
On July 12, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the “Quantum Computing for Plasma Physics” satellite meeting of the 51st EPS Conference on Plasma Physics, Vilnius, Lithuania.
On September 5, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EPS PPD Board meeting, online.
On October 2, Federico Cipolletta, Dani Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen visited ITER, France, together with the CASE department head José M. Cela and CASE researchers Fernando Cucchietti and Tomas Andrade.
From October 13 to 15, Xavier Sáez participated in the 7^th MareNostrum Hackathon with the BIT1 code to enhance its porting to GPU under the guidance of expert mentors.
On November 14, Federico Cipolletta, presented a talk entitle “PhD and job opportunities in HPC for Nuclear Fusion at the BSC, Spain” at the NucPhys Career Orientation Day online workshop organized by the University of Seville, Spain.
From November 25 to 26, our Fusion Group participated in the 3^rd Annual Meeting of the EUROfusion HPC Advanced Computing Hubs (ACHs) held at the EPFL campus in Lausanne, Switzerland. Our research group contributed to the meeting with presentations on the work carried out at the CIEMAT-BSC ACH on the following codes: GENE-X (Alejandro Soba), SPEC (Alejandro Soba), SPICE2 (Alejandro Soba), JOREK (Federico Cipolletta), BIT1 (Xavier Sáez), XTOR-K (Xavier Sáez) and ERO2.0 (Augusto Maidana).
On November 27 and 28, Juan Manuel Sánchez attended the “España cuantica: cierre del año Internacional de la Cuántica en España” meeting organized by the Ramon Areces Foundation, where he represented the group’s interest in applying quantum computing to fusion research.
On December 3 and 4, Dani Gallart together with Andrés Román (Innovation Manager) attended the BSIFS25 where they held several networking meetings with Spanish industrial actors developing fusion technology solutions.
From October to December, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart attended the Innovation Journey Program, where they explored the viability of Alya4Fusion as a spin-off. They won the 2^nd prize at the pitch competition (out of 12 teams), where the jury assessed the potential of the projects.

Go to past events
(2024-2016)