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.
Mervi Mantsinen, ICREA Research professor and our Fusion group manager at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), has been selected for the European Physical Society Plasma Physics Division Board.
Mervi will start her tasks in the board in June 2021, together with five other newly selected members. The term will be four years from summer 2021 to summer 2025, renewable by mutual agreement for a second four-year term.
“It is a honour and a recognition by many people to be selected for this position of trust, which involves taking part with an active and visible role in many top-level decisions in the field”, Mervi states.
EUROfusion has organized a series of monthly webinars to address several GPU topics to help the fusion community to use this architecture on new supercomputers. The webinars consist of talks from programing paradigms to the developers’ experience, vendors’ technical talks, etc.
All the talks are recorded and there are publicly available on YouTube EUROfusion channel. Presentation and questions slides can be found on EUROfusion website.
