On 20 April 2017, our Fusion group researcher Xavier Sáez visited the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany, to participate in the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST).
Xavier presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of SFINCS and FELTOR codes. SFINCS is a novel drift-kinetic solver which can be used to predict neoclassical flows in 3D magnetic configurations while FELTOR solves 3D full-F gyrofluid model equations with discontinuous Galerkin method.
The High Level Support Team (HLST) provides support to scientists from all Research Units of the EUROfusion consortium for the development and optimization of codes to be used on supercomputers. Such a machine is the “MARCONI” supercomputer hosted by CINECA in Bologna, Italy with a total compute power of about 2 petaflop/s.
HLST consists of a core team based at the IPP Garching (Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik) and of high level support staff provided by the other Research Units of EUROfusion. The HLST members are all HPC experts with a background in developing large scientific applications and particular expertise in numerical algorithms.