On 10 February, Mervi Mantsinen participated online in a EUROfusion Allocation Committee Meeting.
From 13 to 17 March, Federico Cipolletta attended the JOREK General Meeting at ITER Organization, France, and presented a contribution titled “ACH4JOREK – Free Boundary Matrix Compression”.
From 3 April to 31 December, Mervi Mantsinen served as a member of the programme committee and the local organizer of the 4th Fusion HPC Workshop by videoconference.
From 10 April to 13 May, Tomás Bensadón performed a research stay at ITER Organization, funded by the BSC Mobility Grant, under the supervision of Mireille Schneider, investigating ICRF heating schemes for ITER H plasmas, focusing on the 3-ion-scheme.
On 20 April, Ezequiel Goldberg attended the PATC course: Introduction to OpenACC, taught by members of the Accelerators and Communications for HPC Group of the Computer Sciences department of BSC.
On 1 May, Carlos Romero joined our group.
From 16 May to 16 June, Mervi Mantsinen reviewed four proposals submitted to the SciDAC Fusion Energy Sciences Partnerships Funding Opportunity Announcement of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) is an Office of Science program in the USA, which aims to advance the use of high-performance computing to accelerate progress in scientific discovery.
From June, Xavier Sáez and Alejandro Soba are organizing the EUROfusion Ticket Committee (TC) meetings, which are monthly and monitor and address issues reported by EUROfusion users concerning EUROfusion machines (Marconi, Marconi100 and Leonardo) in collaboration with CINECA representatives to solve them.
On 10 June, Dani Gallart was interviewed by Ràdio Farró in their program Fenòmens Naturals and Xavier Sáez presented a public talk titled “La fusió nuclear está de moda!” at the 16th Festa de la Ciència in Barcelona to disseminate our research among the general audience.
From 13 to 15 June, Tomás Bensadón participated in the filming of the MareNostrum5 documentary, which consisted on an interview about the importance of HPC modelling for the development of fusion at ITER and a tour of the ITER assembly hall with the head of the IO Science Division Alberto Loarte.
On 20 June, Tomás Bensadón gave a BSC Mobility Grant Seminar, covering the research carried out during the research stay at ITER, on modelling the RF heating of the 3-ion scheme using the heating code PION integrated into the transport modelling workflow European Transport Solver (ETS), showing results and comparing them to previous modelling performed with the heating codes CYRANO and TORIC.
From 26 to 30 June, Carlos Romero attended the PUMPS+AI 2023 conducted at BSC aimed at enriching the skills of researchers, graduate students and instructors with cutting-edge techniques and hands-on experience in developing applications for many-core processors with massively parallel computing resources like GPU accelerators, with a special focus on artificial intelligence.
On 2 July, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Board meeting of the Plasma Physics Division of European Physical Society at Bordeaux, France.
On 4 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated online in a EUROfusion Allocation Committee Meeting.
On 7 September, Mervi Mantsinen gave an invited Journal of Plasma Physics Colloquium “ICRF heating and ICRF-accelerated fast ions in tokamaks: Modelling and theory-to-experiment comparisons” (online).
On 25 September, Ezequiel Goldberg was granted a EUROfusion Bernard Bigot Researcher Grant (ERG) for 2024 and 2025, to carry out the project entitled “Development of multiphysics fusion simulations for HPC environments”, mentored by group leader Mervi Mantsinen and in collaboration with CIEMAT, UNED and other members from our department.
From 2 to 5 October, Federico Cipolletta attended the 20th European Fusion Theory Conference at Caffè Pedrocchi in Padova, Italy, where he presented the contribution titled “Code optimizations in the BSC Advanced Computing Hub: Implementation of matrix compression for the coupling of JOREK to the 3D realistic conducting wall structures”.
On 6 October, Dani Gallart organized the Catalan session of the FuseNet Teacher Day 2023 together with Dr Ferran Albajar from F4E. Tomás Bensadón also participated in giving a talk on Nuclear Fusion Research in Spain for secondary school teachers, where he summarized the research carried out at the BSC fusion group.
On 20 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 29th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC 2023), London, United Kingdom, and gave a contributed oral “Radio-frequency heating schemes in JET deuterium-tritium plasmas in preparation of ITER”.
On 7 November, Ezequiel Goldberg attended the welcome meeting for the ERG grantees for the 2024-2025 period, hosted online by the Training and Education (TRED) team of EUROfusion.
From 7 to 28 November, Mervi Mantsinen provided upon request to Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Germany, an expert opinion for tenure track evaluation at W2 level.
From 15 to 16 November, Federico Cipolletta, Alejandro Soba, Carlos Romero, Augusto Maidana and Xavier Sáez attended the ACH online meeting. Federico presented the contribution titled “Memory optimization for the response matrices in JOREK”.
From 29 to 30 November, our group and research center organized the 4th Fusion HPC Workshop. The event was in the online format and some members of the group participated: Federico Cipolletta presented the contribution titled “Code optimizations in the BSC Advanced Computing Hub: Implementation of matrix compression for the coupling of JOREK to the 3D realistic conducting wall structures”, which was addressed as one of the most popular talks. Augusto Maidana and Carlos Romero attended the workshop.
From 4 to 5 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated in a Board meeting of the Plasma Physics Division of European Physical Society at Heidelberg, Germany.
From 4 December to 21 January 2024, Mervi Mantsinen provided an expert evaluation upon request to Chalmers University, Sweden, in the matter of promotion to Associate Professor in Physics.
On 6 December, Ezequiel Goldberg attended the online meeting for EUROfusion TRED annual reporting, which introduces new ERG grantees to the details of the annual and final reporting for the EUROfusion Researcher Grants and provides a space for the TRED team to answer any doubts and comments from the candidates regarding the reporting.
2022
On 14 January, Mervi Mantsinen participated as committee member in the PhD degree thesis defense of Mathias Hoppe at the Chalmers University of Technology, Gotherburg, Sweden. The title of his thesis is “Runaway-electron model development and validation in tokamaks”.
On 2 February, Mervi Mantsinen participated online in a EUROfusion Allocation Committee Meeting.
On 10 May, Dani Gallart gave a lecture entitled “Plasma heating with RF waves” and Xavier Sáez gave a lecture entitled “Simulation codes in Fusion Technology” as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain.
On 12 May, Mátyás Aradi, Mary Kate Chessey, and Tomás Bensadon presented contributed oral papers at the 9th BSC Doctoral Symposium 2022 in Barcelona and presented our FusionCAT work on numerical simulations for the atomic beam probe, tungsten metal simulations, and integrated modelling of plasma heating in ITER.
On 17 May, Mervi Mantsinen gave an invited talk M21-17: 2nd harmonic heating of T in DT plasmas in preparation for ITER in the online JET DTE2 Review Meeting.
On 18 May, Mervi Mantsinen gave an invited talk onFusion Research at the CASE Annual Retreat, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Spain.
From 22 to 26 May, Julio Gutiérrez attended the COSIRES 2022 conference at Porquerolles, France, where he presented the work performed by our group with a talk entitled “Study of defects in tungsten from large scale ab initio methods“.
On 29 May, Pol Pastells and Marina García presented a public talk titled “T’imagines alguna cosa més calenta que el Sol?” at the 15th Festa de la Ciència in Barcelona about our FusionCAT work generally, aimed at a general audience and providing some orientation to fusion energy and current research.
From 1 June to 31 December, Mervi Mantsinen served as the chair of the programme committee and the local organizer of the 3rd Fusion HPC Workshop by videoconference.
From 2 to 4 June, Adriana Ghiozzi and Tomás Bensadon attended the first-ever edition of the European Physical Society (EPS) Forum held in Paris, France.
From 27 June to 1 July, Mervi Mantsinen, Tomás Bensadon and Adriana Ghiozzi attended the 48th EPS Plasma Conference online. Tomas presented a poster titled, “Analysis of ITER performance with different heating schemes using predictive integrated plasma modelling” and Adriana presented a poster titled, “Modeling of Alfven cascades in TJ-II with STELLGAP and AE3D codes”.
From 29 June to 23 August, Mervi Mantsinen served as expert evaluator for Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH), Sweden, in matter of promotion to Professor in Fusion Plasma Physics with emphasis on Analysis of Experiment Data.
On 30 August, students Arda Erbasan and Dominik Freinberger gave an oral presentation at the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) Summer of High Performance Computing (HPC) Meeting and presented our FusionCAT work on tungsten metal simulations.
From 6 to 7 October, Ezequiel Goldberg and Adriana Ghiozzi attended the second biannual DEMO Prospective Research and Development Workshop hosted by EPFL and organized by EUROfusion.
On 8 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated in a Board meeting of the Plasma Physics Division of European Physical Society at Culham, UK.
2021
On 27 January, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion E-TASC Scientific board meeting as proponent and PI of the Advanced Computing Hub CIEMAT-BSC.
On 23 March, Mátyás Aradi presented his PhD research project entitled “Atomic Beam Probe Synthetic Diagnostic And Its Application in Fusion Plasmas”. The project is supervised by Mervi Mantsinen and Shimpei Futatani (UPC, Spain).
On 1 April, our group was awarded a new HPC project under the EU-JA Broader Approach collaboration in the Computational Simulation Centre of International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC-CSC). The project is led by Julio Gutiérrez and will provide us 350K node-h (14,000,000 core-h) for the large scale simulation of tungsten by ab initio methods.
On 5 April, Julio Gutiérrez presented our recent progress on the FusionCAT project work on “Large-scale ab-initio study of tungsten metal from linear-scaling density functional theory methods” at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Division Computers in Chemistry (COMP) Symposium on Materials Science.
From 10 to 14 May, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the 28th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (FEC2020) which was held virtually as an online event. She presented a poster entitled “Recent Key Contributions of ICRF Heating In Support of Plasma Scenario Development and Fast Ion Studies on JET and ASDEX Upgrade”.
From 31 May to 4 June, Julio Gutiérrez attended the 2021 Spring Meeting of the European Materials Research Society (E-MRS) and presented our FusionCAT work on the “Ab initio study of defects in tungsten from linear-scaling density functional theory methods”.
On June, Mervi Mantsinen acted as the Board AG-272/748 member on the provision of a tenured academic position (Professor Agregat) for the Department of Physics at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain.
On 2 June, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion E-TASC Scientific board meeting as proponent and PI of the Advanced Computing Hub CIEMAT-BSC.
On 10 June, Mervi Mantsinen gave a presentation “Strategy of DTE2 experiment M21-17: 2nd harmonic heating of T in DT plasmas in preparation for ITER” in the JET Task Force meeting.
From 21 to 25 June, The 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics took place virtually. The event was organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and our group played an important role in the local organizing committee. Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk entitled “Experiments with acceleration of neutral beam ions using third harmonic ion cyclotron resonance heating on ASDEX Upgrade” and Daniel Gallart and Jordi Manyer participated with poster contributions.
From 28 June to 3 September, Donato Jiménez from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) joined our group through the BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme. Donato worked with the modelling tool PION to simulate ICRH in fusion plasmas in tokamaks under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen and Jordi Manyer.
From 30 June to 31 August, Paolo Settembri from the University of L’Aquila (Italy) and Eoin Kearney from University of Edinburgh (UK) joined our group through the PRACE Summer of HPC programme. Paolo and Eoin worked on molecular dynamics simulations of irradiation cascades and thermal conductivity in defective tungsten under the supervision of Julio Gutiérrez.
In July, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center Advanced Computing Hub (ACH @ BSC) started operating and Mervi Mantsinen is its principal investigator. The mission of this hub is to provide computer science, scientific computing and software engineering support for the entire EUROfusion theory/simulation program.
On 5 July, Mervi Mantsinen participated as committee chair in the double PhD degree thesis defense of Anastasia Dvornova at Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and the University Aix-Marseille, France. The title of her thesis was “Toroidal Alfvén eigenmodes in tokamak plasmas”.
On 15 July, Gerard Castro defended his Bachelor thesis entitled >“Fast ion populations during ion cyclotron resonance frequency heating in tokamaks” at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. He carried out his thesis research work in our group during an internship from November 2020 to July 2021 under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen in close collaboration with Jordi Manyer and Dani Gallart.
On 16 July, Irina Gasilova and Pol Pastells joined our group.
On 1 September, Ezequiel Goldberg joined our group.
On 8 September, Oriol Fernandez presented the MSc thesis defense entitled “Experimental validation of a new HPC modelling tool for High Temperature Superconductivity” for the MSc of Modelling for Science and Engineering at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
From 20 September to 1 October, Mátyás Aradi and Tomás Bensadón participated in the 14th Carolus Magnus Summer School on Plasma and Fusion Energy Physics, held as a virtual event by Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. Mátyás gave a presentation in a virtual poster session, titled: “Atomic beam probe synthetic diagnostic and its application in fusion plasmas”.
On 29 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion E-TASC Scientific board meeting as proponent and PI of the Advanced Computing Hub CIEMAT-BSC.
On 30 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Kick-off meeting “WPW7X 2021: Preparation of heating scenarios”.
On 1 October, our group moved from Nexus II building to the first floor of Til·lers building, near to new BSC headquarters building.
From 6 to 8 October, Pedro Bonilla attended the 46th Sociedad Nuclear Española annual meeting that took place in Granada. There, he introduced our group to the researchers and industry stakeholders from Spanish nuclear sector that gather at this event and also contributed to it with the talk “Simulaciones numéricas de alto rendimiento para fenómenos multifísicos de fusión”.
On 20 October, Tomás Bensadón presented the PhD research project entitled “Analysis of ITER performance with different heating schemes using predictive integrated plasma modelling”. The project is supervised by Mervi Mantsinen, tutored by Lluís Batet (UPC) and funded by EUROfusion.
From 21 to 27 October, Oriol Fernández attended the 20th edition of the International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials (ICFRM-20) and presented our recent FusionCAT project research on the “Large-Scale modelling of defects in tungsten by linear-scaling density functional theory calculations”.
From 25 to 29 October, Julio Gutiérrez attended the 20th edition of the International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials (ICFRM-20) and presented our recent FusionCAT project research on the “Large-Scale modelling of defects in tungsten by linear-scaling density functional theory calculations”.
From 25 October to 4 November, Xavier Sáez and Irina Gasilova participated in the BSC GPU Hackathon with the ERO2.0 code to accelerate its porting to NVIDIA GPUs under the guidance of the expert mentors.
On 1 November, Mary Kate Chessey joined our group.
On 1 and 6 November, Mervi Mantsinen participated as scientific coordinator in deuterium-tritium plasma experiment M21-17, “2nd harmonic heating of T in DT plasmas in preparation for ITER”, on the JET tokamak.
From 15 to 17 November, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the ITER ICRH workshop.
On 18 November, Mervi Mantsinen gave a presentation “C41 report of M21-17 (2nd harmonic heating of T in DT plasmas in preparation for ITER)” in the JET Task Force meeting.
From 22 to 23 November, Mátyás Aradi attended the virtual FuseNet 8-bit PhD Event and presented his work, “The Atomic Beam Probe Synthetic Diagnostic”, on the PechaKucha and the poster sessions.
On 23 November, our group organized and participated in the 2021 FusionCAT Annual Meeting, which counted with the attendance of 41 researchers from different backgrounds, institutions and expertise.
From 2 to 3 December, our group and research center organized the 2nd Fusion HPC Workshop with 217 registered participants from 31 countries all over the world. The event was in the online format and some members of the group participated: Pedro Bonilla gave a talk entitled “On simulation of multi-physics fusion phenomena with Alya, a multipurpose High Performance Computing software”, Ezequiel Goldberg gave a talk entitled “Massively parallel deterministic neutron transport solver for fusion multiphysics applications”, Oriol Fernández gave a talk entitled “Experimental validation of a new HPC modelling tool for High-Temperature Superconductivity”, and Julio Gutiérrez gave a talk entitled “Tungsten modelling from large-scale ab-initio methods”.
From 9 to 10 December, Pedro Bonilla attended the Multiphysics 2021 conference that was held online, where he presented the work performed by our group with Alya software with a work entitled “High Performance Computing Simulations for Multi-physics Fusion Phenomena”.
On 10 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated as scientific coordinator in deuterium-tritium plasma experiment M21-17, “2nd harmonic heating of T in DT plasmas in preparation for ITER”, on the JET tokamak.
On 16 December, Dani Gallart gave a presentation entitled “Report of DT scenario extrapolation: 2021 T17-07 report” together with other two scientific coordinators of Task T17-07 in JET Task Force Meeting.
On 17 December, our group participated in the BSC Annual Meeting 2021.
From 17 to 18 December, Julio Gutiérrez attended and gave an invited oral presentation at the 2nd Eurasian Conference on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials (Nanotech-Eurasia 2021) on our BigDFT FusionCAT work on Linear Scaling ab initio simulations of tungsten.
2020
On 1 January, José Lorenzo was awarded with a prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project “Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets”. The grant has started on January 1st 2020 and will last three years.
On 29 January, BSC hosts the kick-off meeting of the FusionCAT project (2019-2022) on the generation of fusion energy with funding from European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, RIS3CAT.
From 3 to 4 February, Jordi Manyer and Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion MST1 Review Meeting at IPP Garching, Germany.
From 10 February until June, Eric Planas, a new student who joined the Fusion group, will work on his BSc thesis under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart. His work will consist of the heating analysis of recent record discharges at JET.
From 11 to 13 February, José Lorenzo participated in the EUROfusion DEMO WPMAG Final Meeting, ENEA, Frascati, Italy.
From 12 March until further notice, our group works from home due to Covid-19.
From 24 to 25 March, our group hosted the EPS2020 Programme Committee meeting by videoconference.
On 30 March, we announced together with the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board and the EPS2020 Programme Committee that the EPS2020 conference in Sitges will be postponed by one year due to Covid-19.
On 15 April, Mervi Mantsinen gave a lecture entitled “Ion Cyclotron Resonance Frequency (ICRF) Heating in Fusion Plasmas” by videoconference as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by the Department of Physics on Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain.
On 21 April, Xavier Sáez attended the online meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST). He presented the work developed to improve the performance of the ERO2 code.
On 14 May, Mervi Mantsinen and Jordi Manyer participated remotely in the EUROfusion WPMST1 Topic 11 experiments on ASDEX Upgrade tokamak, Garching, Germany.
On 18 May, our group leader ICREA Prof. Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “Characterization of first orbit losses by third harmonic ICRF heating of deuterium beam ions on AUG” by videoconference in the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) Monday Morning Meeting, Germany.
On 11 June, the group was awarded a new research project for “FUSION CODES II” (PID2019-110854RB-I00, 89540 EUR; PI: Mervi Mantsinen) within the State R&D Program Oriented to the Challenges of the Society 2019 in Spain. The grant starts in January 2020 and lasts 3 years.
On 12 June, 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. The event took place via videoconference.
On June 15, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “W accumulation and Ti peaking in AUG H mode plasmas with different ICRF heating schemes” by videoconference in the ASDEX Upgrade (AUG) Monday Morning Meeting, Germany.
From 15 to 19 June, Mervi Mantsinen, Jordi Manyer and Albert Gutiérrez attended the WPCD Summer Code Camp online.
From 22 June to 30 August, Lara San Martín Suárez, joined the Fusion Group in the annual International Summer HPC Internship Programme. She worked on modelling the heating of fusion plasmas with ICRF waves in a deuterium tritium (D-T) scenario in JET under supervision of Dani Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen.
Throughout the summer, the highschool student Ruth Mora completed her final project within the group, mentored by our team member Jordi Manyer.
On 1 July, Julio Gutiérrez and Francisco Fernández joined our Fusion Group to work on the FusionCAT project.
On 31 July, Dani Gallart gave guidelines on the strategy of the task he coordinates at JET, T17-07, ICRH strategy for T17-07 (C38).
From 1 September, Mátyás Aradi, a new PhD student who joined the group, will work on the evaluation of Atopic Beam Probe measurements and synthetic diagnostic development in collaboration with the Centre for Energy Research (CER), Budapest, Hungary, under the supervision of Mervi Mantsinen
On 1 September, Tomás Bensadon joined the group as a PhD student under Mervi Mantsinen’s supervision. His work will delve into the analysis of ITER performance with different heating schemes using predictive integrated plasma modelling.
On 1 September, Pedro Bonilla started in our group as a researcher within the RIS3CAT FusionCAT project working on multi-physics modelling of fusion applications, in particular in the simulation of ITER’s First Wall heat diffusion.
On 9 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated as the scientific coordinator of M18-05 “ICRH Scenario Support for D and T plasmas” in the experiments on the Joint European Torus (JET), Culham, UK.
On 10 September, Dani Gallart organized and gave a presentation in T17-07, Progress on D-T prediction of C38 high-performance discharges with PION.
On 14 September, the group co-organized a webinar on Faster Fusion through innovations by Dr Mikhaill Gryaznevich (Tokamak Energy) under the FusionCAT project
From 20 to 25 September, José Lorenzo attended the virtual edition of the 31st Symposium on Fusion Technology (SOFT2020).
On 2 October, our group together with F4E, b_TEC Foundation and UPC co-organised Barcelona’s session of FuseNet Teacher Day.
On 5 October, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “Characterization of first orbit losses by third harmonic ICRF heating of deuterium beam ions on AUG” by videoconference in the Task Force Meeting of the EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak Campaigns Work Package, Garching, Germany.
On 19 October, Mervi Mantsinen gave a talk “W accumulation and Ti peaking in AUG H mode plasmas with different ICRF heating schemes” by videoconference in the Task Force Meeting of the EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak Campaigns Work Package, Garching, Germany.
On 20 October, Xavier Sáez attended the online meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST), where he presented the work developed to improve the performance of the ERO2 code.
On 21 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in a FusionCAT review meeting with Generalitat de Catalunya.
On 23 October, BSC hosted the Annual Meeting 2020 of the FusionCAT project (2019-2022) on the generation of fusion energy with funding from European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, RIS3CAT.
On 26 October, our group was awarded a new project at the Spanish Supercomputing Network (RES project QS-2020-3-0026). RES will provide over 2 million CPU/h for the next 4 months (November 2020 – February 2021), with a likely extension for a second 4-month period (until June 2021). The aim of the project led by Julio Gutiérrez is to set a complete ab-initio description on the structural and electronic properties of defective W structures using the Linear Scaling Density Functional Theory (LS-DFT) methods implemented within the BigDFT code.
From 9 to 10 November, Albert Gutiérrez and Xavier Sáez joined the SC20 supercomputing conference which took place virtually. The conference is promoted and sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the IEEE Computer Society
On 6 November and 4 December, Pedro Bonilla and Mervi Mantsinen participated in the FusionCAT exploitation working group meeting.
From 11 to 13 November, Julio Gutiérrez attended the 19th online USPEX workshop and hands-on tutorial sessions. USPEX is a crystal structure prediction software for designing of new materials, which uses artificial intelligence-based methods like evolutionary structure prediction or particle swarm optimization.
From 23 to 24 November, our 2 Phd students Mátyás Aradi and Tomás Bensadon participated in the 2020 FuseNet PhD Event online, whose programme included the invited talk “European Integrated Modelling (EU-IM), ITER Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite (IMAS) and its high-performance computing applications” by our researcher Jordi Manyer.
On 27 November, our group organised the 1st Spanish Fusion HPC Workshop under the auspices of RES, with our group leader Mervi Mantsinen (BSC and ICREA) together with Shimpei Futatani (UPC), Edilberto Sanchez (CIEMAT) and Alejandro Soba (CONICET) in the Programme Committee and Rose Gregorio as the local organizer. The workshop was free for all and attracted 183 registrations from all over the world. There were 24 talks in total, of which 3, 10 and 11 were plenary, invited and contributed talks, respectively. A virtual tour to the MareNostrum supercomputer was also offered.
On 2 and 18 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated in online meetings with the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board to discuss the 47th EPS Plasma Physics Conference, 21-25 June, 2021. BSC is the local organizer of the event and Mervi Mantsinen is the chair of the local organizing committee.
On 11 December, Mervi Mantsinen was selected to the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board, following the elections that closed on 6 November. The term of service will be four years from summer 2021 to summer 2025, renewable by mutual agreement for a second four-year term.
From 14 to 16 December, José Lorenzo participated in the EUROfusion Work Package Magnets (WPMAG) Annual Meeting that took place virtually. He presented his progress in the EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) “Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets”.
On 23 December, it was announced that the 47th EPS Plasma Physics Conference, organized by the EPS Plasma Physics Division Board and BSC as the local organizer and Mervi Mantsinen as the chair of the local organizing committee, moves online.
2019
From 14 to 25 January, Edgar Olivares visited CIEMAT to work on fast ion modelling with Dr Paco Castejón and Mr Sadig Mullas.
On 16 January, José Lorenzo started in our group as Junior Research Engineer.
From 21 to 25 January, Ignacio Lopez joined Edgar Olivares at CIEMAT to work on fast ion modelling with Dr Paco Castejón and Mr Sadig Mullas.
From 28 January to 1 February, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart visited IPP Garching to participate in an experiment as part of the 2018 EUROfusion Medium Size tokamaks experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. Mervi Mantsinen was the scientific coordinator and Dani Gallart was team member of the experiment.
From 6 February to 30 August, Alejandro Soba from CONICET/CNEA, Argentina, joined us on a sabbatical. His research stay at the group was co-financed by EUROLAB-4-HPC short term mobility funding and Severo Ochoa Mobility funding from BSC.
On 11 February, Prof. Edson de Pinho from Universidad Federal Rural de Río de Janeiro, Brazil, visited our group and gave a talk on “High temperature superconducting devices and risk analysis: usual approach and improvements for design and evaluation”.
From 26 February to 1 March, Ignacio Lopez de Arbina and Albert Gutierrez participated in the Annual Planning Meeting of the EUROfusion Work Package Code Development (WPCD) at CINECA, Bologna, Italy.
From 4 to 8 March, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Analysis and Modelling campaign of the EUROfusion Work Package JET experimental campaign (WPJET1) at the JET tokamak, Culham Science Center, Culham, Oxfordshire.
From 4 to 15 March, Dani Gallart participated in the Analysis and Modelling campaign of the EUROfusion Work Package JET experimental campaign (WPJET1) at the JET tokamak, Culham Science Center, Culham, Oxfordshire.
On 26 March, Mervi Mantsinen gave a lecture entitled “ICRF heating” as part of the Fusion Technology course organized by the Barcelona School of Industrial Engineering (ETSEIB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya – BarcelonaTech (UPC), Spain.
From 1 to 5 April, Mervi Mantsinen and Ignacio Lopez participated in the 3rd ITER Code Camp, Caradache, France.
On 8 April, Jordi Manyer joined officially to our group as intership student.
On 26 April, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the ICREA Annual Meeting, Barcelona, Spain.
From 29 April to 9 May, David Taylor from Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK, visited our group to collaborate with Mervi Mantsinen to facilitate an update of the CHAIN 2 part of the PION code.
On 7 May, Xavier Sáez attended the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST) in the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany. He presented the work developed to improve the performance of the FELTOR and ERO2 codes.
From 7 to 9 May, our group participated in the 6th Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium. José Lorenzo presented his poster “Development of HPC Multiphysics Framework for HTS Magnets in Fusion”. Ignacio López de Arbina and José Lorenzo were volunteers and collaborated to organize the Symposium.
On 11 May, Daniel Gallart and Albert Gutiérrez attended the 11th KIMconference at Barcelona with the title “Tangibilizando la innovación“. The event attracted entrepreneurs, politicians, private and public sector including fusion experts to discuss and learn about innovation.
From 14 to 17 May, Daniel Gallart attended the 23rd edition of the RFPP Conference at Hefei, China, where he presented the latest results on RF heating for the next T and DT campaigns at JET with a work entitled “Modelling of ICRF heating for JET T and DT plasmas”.
On 21 May, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the BSC training course “Impact and innovation in H2020”.
From 23 to 24 May, our group participated in the Annual Retreat of the BSC CASE Department in Altafulla, Spain.
From 3 to 7 June, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Garching, as part of the 2019 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) Topic 11 campaigns.
From 18 to 22 June, Mervi Mantsinen participated as one of the two scientific coordinators of experiment M18-05 “ICRH scenario support in D and T plasmas” at JET. Moreover, she gave a talk entitled “Modelling of three-ion ICRF schemes with PION” in one of the JET task force meeting.
During summer, Marta Florido and Adam Teixido, both 4th year bachelor students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s CFIS programme (Centre de Formació Interdisciplinària Superior), joined our group with an internship as part of the BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme.
On 24 June, Mervi Mantsinen attended as a member of the doctoral committee to the PhD defense ceremony of Ivana Abramovic at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
From 24 to 29 June, José Lorenzo attended the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course was organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence.
From 8 to 12 July, Mervi Mantsinen and Ignacio Lopez de Arbina participated in the 46th EPS Conference on Plasma Physics in Milan, Italy, and presented their contributions entitled “Modelling of three-ion ICRF schemes with PION” and “First applications of the ICRF modelling code PION in the ITER Integrated Modelling and Analysis Suite”, respectively.
From 22 July to 2 August, Sadig Mulas (CIEMAT) and Joona Kontula (Aalto University) joined our group on a research stay within the collaboration between the three institutions (CIEMAT – Aalto University – BSC) on numerical modelling of fast ions in the TJ-II stellarator.
From 5 to 9 August, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart participated in the experiment M18-05 “ICRH scenario support in D and T plasmas” at JET. Mervi participated as one of the two scientific coordinators of the experiment.
On 28 August, Mr Mátyás Aradi visited our group and gave a research seminar entitled “Trajectory Computation for Atomic Beam Probe on Compass Tokamak”.
From 16 to 20 September, Jordi Manyer attended the IPP Summer University for Plasma Physics and Fusion Research organized by the Max Plank Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald. The course covered the main aspects of plasma physics with emphasis on nuclear fusion, both theoretical and experimental results, and also the subjects of energy production and near future energy challenges.
From 30 September to 11 October, David Taylor from Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK, visited our group under the Severo Ochoa mobility program of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He collaborates on updating PION in CHAIN2 for the forthcoming D-T campaign at JET. David also gave a talk entitled “Chain2 analysis on JET” in the series of Severo Ochoa Seminars.
In September, Dani Gallart was promoted to Scientific Coordinator (SC) for task T17-07: DT scenario extrapolation.
From 7 to 10 October, Allah Rakha participated in the 18th European Fusion Theory Conference (EFTC) and delivered a talk titled ‘Shear Alfvén wave continuum spectrum with bifurcated helical core equilibria’, where he presented the modelling results of Alfvén continuum calculations due to helical core equilibria in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak plasmas.
On 8 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the training course “Coaching Fundamentals for Managers” at BSC.
On 14 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the EUROfusion E-TASC Scientific Board meeting with Spokesperson of ACH proposals, IPP Garching, Germany and made a presentation on the BSC proposal for hosting a EUROfusion E-TASC Advanced Computing Hub.
From 14 to 18 October, Albert Gutiérrez visited the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSCN), Poland, to work with the EUROfusion Core Programming Team (CPT) member Tomasz Żok on the performance and integration of fusion codes on virtualized environments.
On 15 October, Xavier Sáez attended the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST) in the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany. He presented the work developed to improve the performance of ERO2 code.
On 15 October, Albert Gutiérrez gave an invited talk at the Poznań University of Technology entitled “Capabilities for HPC workflows in fusion”, where he introduced the HPC needs in fusion as well as the progress of his work on supercomputers Marconi and MareNostrum.
From 15 to 19 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the campaign C38 of the JET experimental work programme (WPJET1) of EUROfusion, Culham Science Center, Culham, UK as Scientific Coordinator for experiment M18-05 “ICRF scenario support in D and T plasmas”.
From 15 to 19 October and from 4 November to 6 December, Dani Gallart participated in the JET C38 campaign through the EUROfusion Work Package JET 1 (WPJET1) at the JET tokamak, Culham Science Center, Culham, UK as Scientific Coordinator (SC) for task T17-07 “DT scenario extrapolation”.
On 21 November, around 60 people from Fusion for Energy visited the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The visit included a presentation of Mervi Mantsinen regarding the research developed by our group and a tour of the MareNostrum supercomputer.
From 9 to 13 December, our group hosted the 2019 final EUROfusion Code Camp of the Work Package on Code Development (WPCD). The meeting was attended by 33 participants from various research units around Europe working on integrated modelling in fusion.
On 16 December, José Lorenzo was awarded with a prestigious EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project “Structural Analyses of DEMO Magnets” by the 28th EUROfusion General Assembly, Athens, Greece.
On 30 December, Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) announced that it will coordinate the FusionCAT project (2019-2022) on the generation of fusion energy with funding from European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), through the Pla Acció of the research and innovation strategy for smart specialization in Catalunya, RIS3CAT.
2018
On 19 January, Mervi Mantsinen attended the Corporate Liaison Programme Day (CLP) focused on Quantum Technologies organized by ICFO, Castelldefels, Spain.
On 14 February, our group appeared in the Spanish LAB24 TV program as an example of applying the new MareNostrum supercomputer to further the science. LAB24 is a TV program of Televisión Española (TVE) that disseminates the work of Spanish laboratories and research centers.
From 22 to 23 February, Allah Rakha presented his work titled “Modelling of Energetic Particle-Driven Alfvénic instabilities in TJ-II plasmas” at Fast Ions Physics workshop, held at IPP Greifswald, Germany.
From 26 February to 9 March, Dr John Wright, Principal Scientist at Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT (USA) visited our group, through a BSC Severo Ochoa incoming mobility funding, in order to install the All-Orders Spectral Algorithm (AORSA) code at MareNostrum to start a collaboration. Moreover John gave several talks where he introduced his research and the main features of AORSA.
From 12 to 17 March, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the on-site working sessions of the analysis and modelling tasks in preparation of the next JET experimental campaign, Culham Science Center, Abingdon, UK.
From 3 to 13 April, our fusion group participated to the WP-CD Code Camp at Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC), Poznan, Poland. Xavier Sáez and Mervi Mantsinen worked in the PION integration into IMAS Kepler workflow. Albert Gutiérrez continued the development on his EUROfusion Engineering Grant and Edgar Olivares supported Albert work and learned how to use ASCOT code.
On 12 April, Xavier Sáez attended the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST) in the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany. He presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of FELTOR code.
On 13 April, Mervi Mantsinen, appeared in the last issue of “Fusion in Europe”. In the article titled as “Dan Brown, MareNostrum and Postdocs in Barcelona”, Mervi explains the relation among the fusion and supercomputing fields.
From 23 to 26 April, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the JET Refresher Course 2018, Culham Science Center, Abingdon, UK.
From 24 to 25 April, our group participated in the 5th Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium. Allah Rakha presented his work “Modelling of Alfvénic instabilities in complex toroidal magnetic geometries for fusion”. Edgar Olivares presented his talk “Robust point-location method for linear and high order meshes. Application to particle transport“. Dani Gallart presented his work “On the quest to reach nuclear fusion as a future energy source” . Marc Fuster presented his poster “Application of the edge-based finite element method for fusion plasma simulations” . Finally, Marc Fuster and Alba Gordó were volunteers and help its organization.
On 4 May, Xavier Sáez gave a talk about the research performed in the fusion group and the Computer Applications in Science & Engineering department to a students group from Master in Astrophysics of the University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain.
From 17 to 18 May, the group participated in the annual retreat of the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) in Altafulla, Spain. The program consisted of speeches, discussions and the study of ths Sprint method, which s a five-phase framework that helps answer critical business questions through rapid prototyping and user testing.
On 1 July, Ignacio Lopez started as Junior Developer in our group, contributing to the installation of the ICRF modelling code PION to the ITER Integrated Modelling and Analysis Suite (IMAS).
From 2 to 6 July, Mervi Mantsinen and Allah Rakha participated in the 45th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics in Prague, Czech Republic. Mervi presented a poster entitled “Modelling of ICRF heating in ASDEX Upgrade discharges with pure wave heating relevant to the ITER baseline scenario” while Allah Rakha‘s poster was entitled “Modelling of Alfvén cascades in NBI heated stellarator plasmas”.
On 27 July, Xavier Sáez has been selected as a High Level Support Team (HLST) member by the General Assembly of EUROfusion.
From 1 August 2018 to 31 January 2019, Allah Rakha visits IPP Garching to work with Dr Philippe Lauber and Prof Jean-Marie Noterdaeme on 3D modelling of fusion plasmas.
On 5 September, The paper “Modelling of JET hybrid plasmas with emphasis on performance of combined ICRF and NBI heating” written by Dani Gallard as first author was published by Nuclear Fusion. Mervi Mantsinen and Xavier Sáez also collaborated in its development. The results will help improve the fusion plasma performance and, hopefully, boost the plasma performance in the forthcoming DTE2 campaign at JET.
On 14 September, Mervi Mantsinen participated as an invited member in the four-person jury to evaluate Dr Remi Dumont’s “Habilitation à Diriger des Rercherches” thesis defense at Aix-Marseille University and CEA (AMU-CEA), France.
On 3 October, Mervi Mantsinen participated in Workshop on ERC proposals preparation CoG’19 at EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST) in the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany. He presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of FELTOR code.
From 6 to 9 November, Allah Rakha participated in the Fusenet PhD event at ITER, Caradache, France.
On 5 November, the group submitted the RIS3CAT Emerging Sector Fusion proposal to the Catalan Research Ministry involving 7 Catalan institutions and a budget of 4 M€.
From 12 to 16 November, Mervi Mantsinen visited the JET tokamak, CCFE, UK, to participate in the 2018 JET experimental campaigns.
From 5 to 23 November, Dani Gallart visited the JET tokamak, CCFE, UK, to participate in the 2018 JET experimental campaigns.
On 3 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Marconi-Fusion allocation committee meeting to decide on the Marconi-Fusion Cycle3 proposals.
From 11 to 14 December, Mervi Mantsinen visited IPP Garching to participate in the 2018 EUROfusion Medium Size tokamaks experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak.
On 20 December, our group attended the BSC Annual Meeting. Dani Gallart and Xavier Sáez gave a talk titled “Looking at the stars” introducing the fusion and explaining the work developed by our group.
On 19 January, the ITER Organization and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in which they agree on the importance of promoting and furthering academic and scientific cooperation in all academic and scientific fields of mutual interest and to advance the training of young researchers. The MoU is valid for a duration of 5 years.
On 15 February, Shimpei Futatani gave an Intensive Course entitled “Introduction to the MHD dynamics in fusion plasmas” at the Graduate School of Sokendai University-NIFS, Japan.
From 1 to 3 March, Shimpei Futatani gave an Intensive Course entitled “Non-linear MHD simulations of ELM dynamics in fusion plasmas” at Kyushu University, Japan.
From 13 to 24 March, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart took part in the EUROfusion modelling and analysis tasks at the Culham Science Center, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom. In particular, they collaborated in the preparedness of fusion simulation codes to simulate plasmas with tritium in preparation of the next campaigns at the JET tokamak.
On 15 March, Mervi Mantsinen joined the Editorial Board of Plasma journal published by MDPI. Plasma is a new open-access, cross-disciplinary scholarly journal of scientific studies related to all aspects of plasma science, such as plasma physics, plasma chemistry and space plasma.
On 7 April, the project ZONALGENE was awarded with computing time as one of 59 succesfull proposals amongst the 117 proposals submitted in the 14th Call for PRACE Project Access. Our group collaborates in this project, led by Jeronimo Garcia (CEA, France), to perform non-linear analysis of zonal flow generation in magnetically confined plasmas on the new MareNostrum supercomputer.
From 17 to 21 April, Shimpei Futatani participated the ITPA Meeting of Pedestal Edge Physics Group at York Plasma Institute. He gave an oral presentation on his work “Non-linear MHD modelling of pellet triggered ELMs” and presented the latest result of pellet ELM control in ITER.
On 20 April, Xavier Sáez attended the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST) in the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany. He presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of SFINCS and FELTOR codes.
From 24 to 25 April, Donald Spong from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, visited our group under the Severo Ochoa mobility program of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He collaborates on the modelling of Alfven eigenmodes in three-dimensional magnetic geometries.
From 24 April to 7 May, Hauke Doerk from the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics (IPP), Germany, visited our group under the Severo Ochoa mobility program of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). He collaborates in the field of nonlinear electromagnetic microturbulence stabilization by fast ions.
From 2 to 4 May, three members of our group participated in the 4th Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium . Allah Rakha presented a poster titled “Simulations of Alfvénic Modes in TJ-II Stellarator” and Felipe Nathan de Oliveira presented a poster titled “Stabilization of microturbulence by fast ions”. Furthermore, Marc Eixarch was volunteer to help organizing the event.
From 8 to 12 May, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching, Germany, where she participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak as part of the 2017 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) campaigns.
From 11 to 12 May, the group participated in the annual retreat of the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) in Altafulla, Spain. The program consisted of speeches, discussions and scientific speed-dating to give an overview of the present activities and to boost collaborations between the different groups of the department.
From 15 to 18 May, our group participated in PRACEdays’17. Felipe Nathan de Oliveira won the PRACE award to the best poster with name “Nonlinear electromagnetic stabilization of ITG micro-turbulence by ICRF-driven fast ions in ASDEX Upgrade”. Shimpei Futatani gave a talk as invited speaker on the Energy & Particle Physics workshop with the title “High Performance Computing for Non-linear MHD Simulations of Pellet Triggered ELMs in Fusion Devices”. Albert Gutiérrez presented a poster titled “Development of a new deterministic neutron transport code for fusion applications”.
From 17 to 31 May, our fusion group contributed with three lectures to the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Shimpei Futatani gave a lecture entitled “Introduction to the MHD dynamics in fusion plasmas”, Mervi Mantsinen gave a lecture entitled “Ion Cyclotron Resonance Frequency (ICRF) Heating in Fusion Plasmas” and Xavier Sáez gave a lecture entitled “Simulation codes in Fusion Technology”.
On 29 May and 3 July, Shimpei Futatani visited ITER to discuss the physics of pellet ELM control in ITER. He discussed the development of JOREK code which solves non-linear 3D MHD physics.
From 30 May to 2 June, Dani Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen attended the 22nd Topical Conference on Radiofrequency Power in Plasmas organized by the Institut de Recherche sur la Fusion par confinement Magnétique (IRFM), France. They presented their research results on the experiments and modelling of heating fusion fuel with waves in the ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF) for high-fusion performance on the JET tokamak. They also coauthored further two invited talks and one poster contribution by Drs Philippe Jacquet, Jef Ongena and Yevgen Kazakov et al. on JET ICRF results.
From 6 to 8 June, Mervi Mantsinen participated in the Workshop on Ion Cyclotron Resonance Frequency Heating (ICRH) scenarios for ITER organized at ITER Headquarters, France. Mervi gave a talk entitled “ICRF scenarios in Deuterium-Tritium plasmas: results from JET DTE1 and preparations of JET DTE2 with extrapolation to ITER” and chaired one of the two session on “Predictive modelling of ICRF scenarios”.
From 6 to 8 June, Marc Eixarch and Stephan Mohr from the Material Science Group at BSC participated in the EUROfusion WPMAT-IREMEV meeting at Rudjer Boskovic Institute (RBI), Zagreb. They gave a talk entitled “Linear scaling DFT simulations for large systems – application to vacancy defects in W” where they presented new results on linear scaling Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations for metals using the BigDFT code.
From 19 to 23 June, Shimpei Futatani worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Garching, where he participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak as part of the 2017 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) campaigns.
On 26 June, the Catalan TV Channel 33 interviewed Mervi Mantsinen regarding to the prospects of fusion energy and its potential impact on society. The programme was a part of the documentary series “El dia de demà” which investigates and discusses many possible future scenarios, ranging from education to energy sources, through the point of view of experts.
From 26 to 30 June, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Nathan Oliveira de Lopes participated in the 44th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Mervi gave a talk entitled “Optimising the use of ICRF waves in JET hybrid plasmas for high fusion yield” and Shimpei and Nathan presented posters entitled “Non-linear MHD Simulations of Pellet Triggered ELM for ITER Plasma Scenarios” and “Nonlinear electromagnetic stabilization of ITG microturbulence by ICRF-driven fast ions in ASDEX Upgrade”, respectively.
From 17 to 21 July, Dani Gallart participated in the 36th Bienal de la Real Sociedad Española de Física in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. He contributed with a paper entitled “Heating modelling and extrapolation of hybrid plasmas at JET”.
On 8 September, Marc Eixarch completed his Master’s Degree in Modeling for Science and Engineering at UAB after presenting successfully his Master thesis, titled “Electronic structure simulations for large metallic systems”.
From 25 to 29 September, Albert Gutiérrez participated in the 13th International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology Kyoto, Japan. He presented a poster entitled “New High Performance Computing Software for Multiphysics Simulations of Fusion Reactors“.
On 28 September, Shimpei Futatani gave a talk titled “Non-linear MHD simulations of ELM control via pellet injection in fusion plasmas” as an invited speaker in the 11th RES Users’ Meeting and 6th HPC Advisory Council Conference at Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
On 4 October, the project “JOREK_P: Non-linear simulations of pellet triggered ELM” was awarded with computing time on Marconi-Fusion as one of the 46 successful proposals amongst the 84 proposals submitted in the 15th Call for PRACE Project Access. This project is led by our Fusion group member Shimpei Futatani in close collaboration with ITER to study magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities at the plasma boundary called Edge Localized Modes (ELMs).
From 9 to 13 October, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Dani Gallart participated in the General Planning Meeting (GPM) at Culham Centre of Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK. Many aspects of the following JET campaigns were discussed at this meeting.
From 16 to 20 October, Shimpei Futatani worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP), Garching, where he participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak as part of the 2017 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) campaigns.
From 23 October to 3 November, Dr. Sergei Sharapov from Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK, visited our group under the Severo Ochoa mobility programme to collaborate on the modelling of Alfvenic instabilities in the TJ-II discharges. He also delivered a talk entitled “Magnetic nuclear fusion and fast ion driven Alfvén instabilities”.
On 2 November, the project “Non-linear MHD modelling of pellet injection for ELM control in fusion plasmas” of Shimpei Futatani (PI) awarded the computing time in the period P3 2017 of RES (Red Española de Supercomputación).
From 6 to 17 November, Dani Gallart, Mervi Mantsinen (only from 13th to 17th) and Shimpei Futatani participated in the Analysis and Modelling task of JET and the MST1 General Planning Meeting (GPM) at Culham Centre of Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK.
On 16 November, Mervi Mantsinen, Shimpei Futatani and Dani Gallart visited to Tokamak Energy facilities at Oxfordshire, UK.
On 7 December, Mervi Mantsinen participated as the chair of the Magnetic Confinement Plasma subpanel in the Programme Committee Meeting of the 45th European Physical Society Conference of Plasma Physics at Culham, UK. In the meeting, the plenary and invited talks for this conference that will take place in Prague from 2nd to 6th July 2018 were selected.
On 18 December, Shimpei Futatani visited ITER, France, to discuss the physics of pellet ELM control in ITER. He discussed the development of JOREK code which solves non-linear 3D MHD physics.
On 18 December, Mervi Mantsinen received a distinction in the 12thBarcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) Annual Meeting as ICREA Research Professor in the centre. The award consisted in an original MareNostrum 1 node personalized.
On 21 December, Albert Gutiérrez was awarded with an EUROfusion Engineering Grant (EEG) for his project entitled “Software Engineering: Development of High Performance Computing capability for fusion workflows, integrated to the ITER Modelling framework”. This year more than 40 people applied and only 20 people were selected for an EEG. The grant starts on 1st January 2018 with a duration of three years.
2016
On 24 January, this blog started its activity in order to foster the dissemination of research in the group and to provide information about the current status of fusion field in the world.
From 15 to 26 February, Allah Rakha visited the JET tokamak located at Culham Centre of Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK, to collaborate with Sergei Sharapov on the modelling of JET plasmas. This visit was carried out under the EUROfusion JET experimental campaign.
On 17 February, AcademiaNet webpage wrote an article titled “Fusion Research on the Rise” which mentioned the group leader Mervi Mantsinen. Other physics professors referenced were Sibylle Günter, Ursel Fantz and Tünde Fülöp.
From 4 to 8 April, Allah Rakha participated with theory group for the modelling of 3D physics of Alfvenic activity in the flexible Heliac TJ-II at Madrid, Spain. He also had the opportunity to visite the TJ-II reactor.
From 4 to 12 April, Mervi Mantsinen visited the JET tokamak at Culham, United Kingdom, to take part in the EUROfusion experimental JET campaign. Unfortunately, the experiments that she was coordinating could not go ahead due to technical problems with the machine.
On 13 April, Shimpei Futatani visited the INRIA Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France, to participate in the 2nd JOREK General Meeting which involved presentations and discussions about JOREK code. Shimpei presented his recent work of the ELM triggering by a pellet in ASDEX Upgrade plasma.
On 15 April, Xavier Sáez gave a lecture titled “Simulation codes in Fusion Technology” as part of the Fusion Technology Course of the Nuclear Engineering Master organized by Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. This lecture was focused on High Performance Computing in the fusion research field.
From 4 to 6 May, the group participated in the 3rd BSC International Doctoral Symposium. Albert Gutiérrez an Daniel Gallart presented posters entitled “Reproducing crowd turbulence with Verlet integration and agent modeling” and “Extrapolations of the fusion performance in JET”, respectively. Carles Riera and Felipe Nathan were part of the Organizing Committee as volunteers, and Mervi Mantsinen chaired the first talk session.
From 19 to 20 May, the group was off to Altafulla, Tarragona, for the annual retreat of the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE). The program consisted of speeches, discussions and scientific speed-dating to give an overview of the present activities and to boost collaborations between the different groups of the department.
From 7 to 9 June, Mervi Mantsinen and the BSC researchers Georg Huhs and Stephan Mohr participated in a EUROfusion meeting on fusion materials at the University of Alicante, Spain. During the meeting they presented the recent advances developed in large-scale atomistic materials modeling at Barcelona Supercomputer Center (BSC).
On 28 June, Dani Gallart received one of the prestigious grants from “La Caixa” in order to support his PhD studies, devoted to plasma heating using ICRF waves, in our group during a period of four years.
From 1 to 6 July, Donald A. Spong from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA, visited our group to collaborate with Allah Rakha on 3D simulations of Alfvenic instabilities. He gave a lecture entitled “Alfven spectra and energetic particle driven instabilities in 3D configurations” during his stay.
From 4 to 8 July, our group attended the 43rd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics in Leuven, Belgium. Shimpei Futatani gave a talk titled “Non-linear MHD Simulations of Pellet Triggered ELMs in JET and ASDEX Upgrade tokamaks”, Dani Gallart presented his work “Simulations of combined ICRF and NBI heating for high fusion performance in JET” and Mervi Mantsinen presented “Third harmonic ICRF heating of deuterium beam ions on ASDEX Upgrade” and also chaired one of the sessions of the meeting.
From 5 to 8 September, Felipe Nathan de Oliveira presented a poster titled “Modeling of 3He minority heating and transport levels in AUG discharges with large core ion temperature gradient” in the 21th Joint EU-US Transport Task Force Meeting, held in Leysin, Switzerland.
On 9 September, Carles Riera, successfully presented his Master thesis, titled “Development of a Deterministic Neutron Transport Code Based on the Alya System at Barcelona Supercomputing Center”. The oral exposition took place at the Faculty of Sciences of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.
On 26 September, Allah Rakha and Dani Gallart defended succesfully their PhD research plans at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Allah Rakha studies fast ions physics and Alfven eigenmodes while Dani Gallart devotes his studies to plasma heating with ion cyclotron resonance frequency (ICRF) waves.
On 30 September, our fusion group hosted a meeting on Monte-Carlo Random Numbers with a multidisciplinary group of experts from the Institute of Photonic Sciences ICFO, Spain; National Institute for Fusion Science NIFS, Japan; CIEMAT Fusion National Laboratory and Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
On 5 October, Mervi Mantsinen attended EUROfusion HPC Allocation Committee meeting at CINECA, Bologna, Italy. The meeting was to evaluate the Cycle 1 proposals for Marconi-Fusion supercomputer.
On 6 October, Xavier Sáez visited the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany, to participate in the meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST). Xavier presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of SFINCS code.
From 10 October to 4th November, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart took part in the C36b experimental campaign of the JET tokamak at the Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK. Mervi was one of the four scientific coordinators of experiment M15-02 which lasted nine sessions (4.5 operational days) and developed the so-called hybrid plasma scenario for the forthcoming JET campaign.
From 17 to 22 October, Shimpei Futatani attended the 26th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in Kyoto, Japan. Shimpei has presented his work “Non-linear MHD modelling of pellet triggered ELMs” at the meeting.
From 24 to 26 October, Shimpei Futatani gave an oral presentation on his work “JOREK modelling of pellet triggered ELMs” at the ITPA Meeting in Naka, Japan.
From 27 October to 17 November, Shimpei Futatani visited the Kyoto University, Japan, under international collaboration on stellarator research of the EUROfusion Stellarator Optimization Work Package (WPS2).
From 14 to 18 November, Mervi Mantsinen and Felipe Nathan de Oliveira participated in the 2017 Planning meeting of EUROfusion Work Package on Medium Size Tokamaks (WP MST1) at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasmaphysics, Garching, Germany. In her presentation Mervi reviewed the past activities and discussed her views and visions for the coming years.
On 24 November, Nature published an article on how Catalonia has succeed keeping a high research level getting over budget cuts of 39%. The article, titled “Staying a steady course through the storm“, does a special mention to our center describing its research and supercomputing facilities, and to our Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) department as devoted to industry collaboration.
On 12 December, Felipe Nathan de Oliveira was mentioned in the December’s edition of the EUROfusion‘s Newsletter. Concretely, he appeared in the article “How to tame plasma turbulence” that explains the research done by the fusion community on Plasma Turbulence using as an example the last Transport Task Force Meeting where he was a participant.
On 23 December, our group had the opportunity to attend the presentation of the new supercomputer MareNostrum4 that will be installed at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). The event counted with the participation of the companies that collaborate in the start-up of the new machine: IBM, Intel, Lenovo and Fujitsu.
