New summer interns at BSC Fusion Group

Marta Florido and Adam Teixido, both 4th year bachelor students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s CFIS programme (Centre de Formació Interdisciplinària Superior), have joined us this summer with an internship program. Both internships are part of the BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme aims to encourage students to start a research career in our multidisciplinary research center. The Severo Ochoa award funds this Programme.

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Fusion at the 2019 PUMPS Summer School

Participants in PUMPS+AI Summer School at UPC.

As customary in previous years, last week the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) was held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course is organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Our team member José Lorenzo had the opportunity to attend the course.

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Starting a new experimental campaign at JET

View from the JET control room during this week’s experiments.

The new EUROfusion experimental campaign at the Joint European Torus (JET) located at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK started earlier this week.

Our group leader Mervi Mantsinen participates in this new experimental campaign as one of the two scientific coordinators of experiment M18-05 “ICRH scenario support in D and T plasmas” at JET. This means that she is in charge of the scientific planning of this experiment and the coordination of its international team of approximately 45 scientists from various institutions all over Europe.

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Experiments with high-energy ions on ASDEX Upgrade

Interior view of the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. Source: IPP.

Last week, 3-7 June 2019, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen worked at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) at Garching, Germany where she participated in the experimental campaign on the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak as part of the 2019 EUROfusion Medium Size Tokamak (MST1) campaigns.

The MST1 Task Force coordinates European joint experiments of the medium sized tokamaks, i.e. ASDEX Upgrade at IPP, Garching, Germany; MAST Upgrade at CCFE, Culham Science Centre, Abingdon, United Kingdom; and TCV at CRPP, Lausanne, Switzerland.

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MareNostrum 5, the highest EU investment in a research infrastructure in Spain

On 7 June, the European Commission (EC) has officially announced that EuroHPC has selected Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) as one of the institutions that will host a pre-exascale supercomputer in the high-capacity supercomputer network that will operate in the EU in 2021. The EC announcement describes the plan to acquire 3 pre-exascale machines with a peak performance of at least 150 Petaflops: Barcelona (Spain), Bolonia (Italy) and Kajaani (Finland).

The future MareNostrum 5 will be a heterogenous supercomputer that will achieve a peak performance of 200 Petaflops (200 · 1015 of operations per second), which is 18 times more than current MareNostrum 4.

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