On 29 and 30 November 2023, the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) actively participated in the yearly workshop regarding research in HPC for Fusion, which has now arrived at its 4th edition.
The Workshop is meant to be a gathering appointment for experts in HPC in the research field of Nuclear Fusion. The covered topics were related to the different ways in which HPC methods and algorithms, spanning across Monte-Carlo methods, Neural Networks, and Parallelization Exploitation, can be extremely valuable for applications, going from the simulation of MHD instabilities to System Analysis, to reach efficient ways of energy production through Nuclear Fusion.
A total of 31 talks have been organized in 11 Zoom Sessions, giving life to an exhaustive program covering all the relevant topics. The 5 keynote talks, of great inspiration for the audience, were:
- Cristina Rea, from MIT, USA – “A review of explainable Machine Learning accelerating Fusion science”
- José Manuel García-Regaña, from CIEMAT, Spain – “Stellarator turbulence simulation in Europe: a tour of its latest achievements”
- Gilles Fourestey, from EPFL, Switzerland – “How EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hubs leverage high-performance computing to accelerate research and engineering in nuclear fusion”
- Sergei Dudarev, from CCFE, UK – “The computational principles of a virtual tokamak reactor”
- Andrew Davis, from CCFE, UK – “High Performance Multiphysics driven design for fusion systems”
Attendees from the BSC have held talks as well. Federico Cipolletta from our Fusion Group presented an invited contribution regarding his work on response matrix compression for the JOREK code. In addition, Joan Vinyals from the Best Practice for Portability and Programmability Group contributed with a presentation regarding the performance optimization reached in the ERO2.0 code. The aforementioned works find their context within the EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub (ACH) and are two examples of prosperous efforts put into this activity at the BSC.
More than 300 participants, from international research institutions, universities, and companies had the great opportunity to share their latest achievements, through this online event. The impressive growth in attendance and heterogeneity of the participants’ work origin is an expression of the success of this research field, in which more and more people are involved, and that represents one rare case where private companies are deeply interested in collaborating with researchers.
Many thanks to the Program and Local Organizing Committees!
The workshop was supported by the Departament de Recerca i Universitats de la Generalitat de Catalunya via the Research Group Fusion Group with code: 2021 SGR 00908.
