Our team members Oriol Fernández and José Lorenzo attended the 7th International Workshop on Numerical Modelling of High-Temperature Superconductors from 22nd to 23rd June. The event was planned to be held in Nancy, France, in 2020 but due to the current pandemic situation it had to be postponed and finally took place remotely in 2021.
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.
We are glad to announce that a joint EU-Japan HPC project led by the BSC Fusion Group’s researcher Julio Gutiérrez has been recently granted 350K node-h (14,000,000 core-h). The project will run over one year on the Japan Fusion Reactor Simulator (JFRS-1), located at the Computational Simulation Centre of the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC-CSC) in Rokkasho (Aomori, Japan).
As in its previous editions, our Fusion Group is contributing several lectures to the fusion course imparted within the Nuclear Engineering MSc at UPC. The course gives an overview of plasma physics and fusion technology, presenting a broad scope of topics. The topics are taught by experts in each of the fusion fields covered, with external lecturers mainly provided by Fusion for Energy (F4E) and our Fusion Group at BSC.
The BSC Fusion Group’s researcher Dr Julio Gutiérrez presented our recent progress on the FusionCAT project work on “Large-scale ab-initio study of tungsten metal from linear-scaling density functional theory methods” at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Division Computers in Chemistry (COMP) Symposium on Materials Science focused on Method Development/Machine Learning/Material Properties (Paper ID 3529923). The presentation took place on April 5 and it is available on-demand between April 19-30 on the conference web platform.
Who could have imagined a year ago that life and work as we knew it would change so drastically overnight? On March 14th 2020, just over one year ago, Spain declared the state of alarm due to the COVID-19 pandemic and ordered a 15-day complete lockdown. That lockdown lasted 3 months. The pandemic is still very much ongoing. From masks in public spaces to working from home, all of us had to adapt to new ways of living our lives. Never would I have thought that today, over 365 days later, I would consider these things a normal part of my life.
Without question, this past year has been a weird and difficult one for everyone. A year of uncertainty, for some also a year of pain. And for all of us who had the privilege (yes, the privilege!) of working from home, a year of learning. Learning to communicate, to cooperate and to interact through the web. Learning to cope with loneliness in the workspace. Learning to be productive at home. All in all, learning to telework.