Recent events, research visits and conference participations

2026

On January 7, the review paper entitled “40 years of ICRF Physics on the JET Tokamak: Highlights and Lessons Learned for Future Facilities” by Mervi Mantsinen et al. was published in EPJ Web of Conferences. This paper was based on her invited talk at the 25^th Topical Conference on Radio-Frequency Power in Plasmas (RFPPC) in May 2025.
On January 8, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the first meeting of the jury for the Barcelona City Awards in Fundamental Sciences and Mathematics at Barcelona City Council.
On January 8, Mervi Mantsinen was admitted to the pool of the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator call 2026 remote evaluators – Technology experts and Evaluation Panel members.
On January 21, Mervi Mantsinen participated in an Editorial Board Meeting of the Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion journal of IOP Publishing, online.
On January 22, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the second meeting of the jury for the Barcelona City Award in Fundamental Sciences and Mathematics at Barcelona City Council.
On January 30, our group was visited by researchers from the Superconducting Materials and Functional Nanoengineered Structures Group (SUMAN) at ICMAB-CSIC, Spain.
On February 6, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 25^th year Anniversary Celebration of ICREA.
From February 9 to 13, Federico Cipolletta, Mervi Mantsinen and Alejandro Soba participated in the 2^nd EUROfusion ETASC General Meeting, Garching, Germany.
On February 13, Mervi Mantsinen visited Proxima Fusion, Munich, Germany and gave an invited talk “Accelerating Stellarator R&D with High-Performance Computing: Lessons from BSC’s Integrated Modeling, HPC Optimization, and RF Physics”.
From February 24 to 25, our group participated in the 6^th Fusion HPC Workshop, online. The workshop is co-organized by our group, with Mervi Mantsinen as the chair of the programme committee and Xavier Saez as a member of the local organization committee.
On February 26, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the new Trends in Fusion Engineering Analysis Workshop, co-organized online by F4E and BSC, and gave an invited talk “The role of HPC in engineering analysis: present and future challenges” and chaired a roundtable discussion session “The role of HPC in engineering analysis”. Ezequiel Goldberg and Federico Cipolletta attended the workshop and participated in the discussion sessions “Engineering analysis workflow in complex systems” and “The role of AI in engineering analysis”, respectively.
On February 27, Mervi Mantsinen chaired a Programme Committee meeting of the 6^th Fusion HPC Workshop.
From March 2 to 4, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 4YFN conference in Barcelona, Spain, and gave a talk “Accelerating Fusion Energy with Advanced Simulation” at the BSC booth.
On March 3 and 11, Alejandro Soba, Ezequiel Goldberg, Hernán Domingo, and Marc Rodriguez Vitolo attended a course on creating miniapps with Alya.
On March 4, Ezequiel Goldberg and Mervi Mantsinen attended the IAEA-hosted webinar “Defining a fusion power plant: Gauss Fusion’s GIGA Conceptual Design”.
From March 16 to 20, Juan Manuel Sánchez attended the Spring school about near term Quantum Computation in Benasque, Spain.
On March 16, Adam Canarutto joined our group as a Master thesis student.
On March 18, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the jury of the PhD thesis entitled “Gradient Boosted Decision Trees and Neural Networks for Accelerated Turbulent Transport Modelling of Tokamak Plasmas” of Matisse Lanzarone at the Aix-Marseille University, France.
On March 27, 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 March 30, the paper “Enhancing a fuel performance tool for advanced modeling of spent fuel behavior under storage conditions” was published in the journal Nuclear Engineering and Design written in collaboration with Argentinean researchers, by Ezequiel Goldberg and Alejandro Soba.
On April 2, Mervi Mantsinen, was awarded a Trusted Reviewer status by IOP Publishing in recognition of her commitment and expertise as a reviewer.
On April 13, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the jury of the PhD thesis entitled “Optimisation of fast-ion confinement via externally-applied magnetic perturbations in the MAST-U tokamak” Of Lina Velarde Gallardo at the University of Seville, Spain.
On April 21, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Industry Info Day of the 25^th International Stellarator and Heliotron Workshop (ISHW-2026), Córdoba, Spain.
From April 21 to June 19, Mervi Mantsinen participated as expert evaluator for the EURATOM SOFT Innovation Prize 2026.
On April 24, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 2026 annual meeting of ICREA, Barcelona, Spain.
From May 4 to 8, Augusto Maidana visited Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Germany. It was a EUROfusion mission within the E-TASC programme to collaborate with the ERO2.0 code developer team.
From May 18 to 22, Hernán Domingo and Mervi Mantsinen attended the EC-23 workshop in Barcelona. Hernán presented a poster “ECRH frequency-range simulation using massively parallelised finite element code”.
On May 19, our group, coordinated by Xavier Saez, hosted a visit by the participants of the EC-23 workshop to BSC including MareNostrum5 and quantum computers.
On May 27-28, our group participated in the annual retreat of the Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) Department of BSC in Altafulla, Spain.
On June 3, the manuscript “EQUILIPY: a static forward Grad-Shafranov solver using CutFEM” by Pau Manyer, Juan Manuel Sanchez Melian, Dani Gallart, Mervi Mantsinen and Alejandro Soba was accepted for publication in Computer Physics Communications.
From June 8 to 26, our group hosted a Severo Ochoa mobility stay of Irene Casiraghi from the Institute for Plasma Science and Technology of the National Research Council of Italy (ISTP-CNR).
From June 15 to 19, our group together with the BSC Materials Science group hosted a research visit by Eliu Huerta from the Argonne National Laboratory, USA.
On June 17, Irene Casiraghi gave a Severo Ochoa WomenInBSC research seminar entitled “Exploring fusion plasmas through integrated modelling” which was chaired by Mervi Mantsinen.
On June 18, Eliu Huerta gave a Severo Ochoa research seminar entitled “Frontiers in AI for Science” which was chaired by Julio Gutierrez from the BSC Materials Science group.
On June 19 and 28, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the European Physics Society Plasma Physics Division Board meeting online and in Edinburgh, Scotland, respectively.
From June 29 to July 3, Juan Manuel Sánchez, Hernán Domingo and Mervi Mantsinen attended the EPS Plasma Physics Conference 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Juan Manuel presented the poster “Towards Quantum Plasma Simulation: Benchmarking Variational Quantum Algorithms for Electromagnetic Wave Propagation” and Hernán presented the poster “Development and validation of a massively parallelised RF wave propagation solver in magnetised plasmas”.
On June 29, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 2026 Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion (PPCF) Editorial Board Meeting in Edinburgh, Scotland.
On July 10, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the opening event of the exhibition “Women in BSC: Where Talent Inspires Talent at BSC”. This exhibition is an initiative to recognize, highlight, and celebrate the women of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center who contribute every day to the advancement of science across multiple disciplines, career paths, and roles. Mervi is among the twenty-two women who are featured in this exhibition.

Go to past events
(2025-2016)