Dr John Wright, Principal Scientist at Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT (USA) visited the BSC fusion group for two weeks in March, funded by BSC Severo Ochoa incoming mobility funding. The objective of his visit was to install the All-Orders Spectral Algorithm (AORSA) code at MareNostrum.
AORSA solves the integral form of the wave equation in 2-D to all orders in Larmor radius over perpendicular wavelength. As the code does not make any assumption on the smallness of the Larmor radius relative to the perpendicular wavelength, AORSA is able to solve the wave equation for a wide range of wavelengths, not being restricted exclusively to long wavelengths. If 3-D simulations are required, AORSA solves the wave equation for several toroidal modes (instead of a fixed one) which are decoupled from the coupled poloidal and radial modes. Moreover, AORSA is a parallelised code and, therefore, it runs efficiently on a supercomputer.
During his two weeks visit, John gave a Severo Ochoa (SO) talk and several talks to the fusion group where he introduced his research and the main features of AORSA. He worked closely with our PhD student Dani Gallart, simulating several JET cases using AORSA. It was a pleasure to host John at BSC and we look forward to continuing our collaboration.
