The year 2021 is coming to its end and it is time for us to take a small break to disconnect, rest and celebrate. We would like to thank all our followers for their continued interest in our work.
For us here at the BSC Fusion group it has been a good year despite being still affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in our daily lives, including our work.
In 2021 we have seen the group grow with eight new people while we said good-bye to three members of the team as they moved on following their path elsewhere. We are grateful for all their contributions to the group and for the time we could work together.
The growth in the group size and the scope in our activities has been thanks to our projects that have kept us quite occupied this year. In particular, we have continued to coordinate the FusionCAT emerging sector project involving seven partner institutions located here in Catalonia (Spain). It was great to see the advancement of the project tasks in our annual meeting just a month ago and hear our scientific advisors congratulate the project team on the good progress since our last meeting together.
The other important project for our group is EUROfusion, the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy. Our participation in the EUROfusion programme got to a new higher level this year by the start of the EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub at CIEMAT-BSC. Being awarded this hub was a great honour for us and at the same time a culmination of efforts by many people over the past few years preparing, refining and defending our proposal. We are pleased that our hub activities have started well and we are now working on all the planned technical tasks in full swing in close collaboration with other BSC groups and European code developer teams in fusion.
In 2021, we were also very occupied with two key events that we organized as online events. We will always look back to the 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics in June with the great sense of achievement. Another memorable event for us was the 2nd Fusion HPC workshop early this month. With its 234 registrations, it was a clear demonstration that there is wide interest for an event with its scope. Given the positive feedback, we look forward to planning the next event following the good suggestions we received in response to the post-event survey.
Finally, we are pleased to note that early next year will mark the 6th anniversary of this fusion blog. Among the posts we wrote this year, it turns out that the five most accessed posts (excluding announcements of jobs and events) were:
- Our contributions to the historic fusion experiments at Joint European Torus (JET)
- My Summer Internship at BSC Fusion Group
- Our newest contribution to the journal of Fusion Engineering and Design
- Our collaborative EU-Japan HPC simulation project on large-scale ab-initio modelling of Tungsten
- Our group leader’s reflections to mark the International Day of Women and Girls in Science
Perhaps you could enjoy checking these highlights out in case you have not seen them yet? We believe they would give you a nice glimpse to the work we do and share some important milestones in our field.
Acknowledgements This work has been partly carried out within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium, funded by the European Union via the Euratom Research and Training Programme (Grant Agreement No 101052200 – EUROfusion). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them. The FusionCAT project (001-P-001722) has been 50% co-financed with € 1.960.963,66 by the European Fund for Regional Development of the European Union within the framework of the 2014-2020 ERDF Operational Program of Catalonia, with the support of the Generalitat of Catalonia.
