During the weekend of October 9 and 10, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) organized several activities to celebrate the opening of its new corporate headquarters, a 12,000-square-meter building with a capacity for 530 workers which will allow greater interaction between the researchers at the center.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre -Centro Nacional de Supercomputacion (BSC) coordinates FusionCAT, an initiative that brings together seven Catalan institutions to collaborate in the field of research and development of fusion energy technology. The cutting-edge tools to develop are focused on High-Performance simulations of several coupled physics phenomena that take place in fusion reactors. These go from fuel production to energy harvesting, including plasma and neutron transport and new materials development.
We here at the Barcelona Computing Center (BSC) have the pleasure to host the 2nd Fusion HPC Workshop as an online event with Zoom on December 2-3, 2021. This workshop follows the virtual 1st Spanish Fusion HPC Workshop, which took place on November 27, 2020 and attracted 183 registrations from all over the world.
Barcelona Supercomputing Center Advanced Computing Hub (ACH @ BSC) has started operating this July. The mission of this hub is to provide computer science, scientific computing and software engineering support for the entire EUROfusion theory/simulation program.
Initially, five simulation codes have been assigned to our ACH to give support to them in 2021-2022: ERO2, STELLA, SPICE-2D, KNOSOS and BLUEMIRA.
The 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics took place virtually on 21-25 June 2021. This conference brought together top researchers in the wide field of plasma physics ranging from nuclear fusion to low temperature, astrophysical and laser plasmas.
The numbers speak for themselves of the success of the conference: more than 700 registered participants, 187 talks and 432 live poster presentations.
The EUROfusion consortium will invest a total of € 59.8 million in nineteen research projects in their Work Plan 2021-2025 to strengthen understanding and predicting of fusion processes in the European fusion programme. One of these projects will benefit from the expertise at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to improve the computational conditions for fusion energy.
Prior to this EUROfusion investment, BSC already holds two reference HPC performance groups in Europe, i.e. the PRACE High-Level Support Team (HLST) and the Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP CoE). The new EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub (ACH) will become the third one. The PRACE HLST, POP CoE and BSC Fusion group members played a key role in building the winning proposal, thus making BSC one of the three reference European teams in HPC performance for fusion. The BSC ACH will include 8 full-time team members with secured funds until 2025.