BSC celebrated its Annual Meeting 2017 on Monday the 18th of December. The meeting started with a speech by BSC Director Mateo Valero and BSC Associated Director Josep Martorell about the BSC achievements in 2017 and the outlook for 2018, including answers to a number of questions raised by the personnel prior to the meeting.
The directors highlighted new processor, personalized medicine and artificial intelligence as the three current strategic key projects.
The Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) is looking for an internship student with a degree in physics or computer science. The position supports the development and applications of plasma simulation codes in the group and involves different state-of-the-art technologies.
The General Planning Meeting (GPM) of the Medium Sized Tokamaks (MST1) was organized this year at at the JET facilities, Culham, UK. The meeting started with an overview of the present status of AUG (Garching, Germany) and TCV (Lausanne, Switzerland) tokamaks. They were followed by a presentation on MAST-U (Culham, UK) which will be back in operation next year with the new and exciting Super-X divertor. It will be able to drastically reduce the divertor heat load from particles leaving the plasma.
Tokamak Energy is a privately-funded company grown out of Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE), UK, in 2009 to design and develop small spherical tokamaks to produce neutrons for a range of scientific applications. Currently, it embarks on the quest for a compact solution for fusion providing energy into the grid by 2030.
Tokamak Energy collaborates with Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Imperial College of London, University of Oxford and University of Tokyo, amongst other institutions. As a private venture, its developments are covered by over 20 families of patent applications.
Our PhD student Mr Allah Rakha participated in the 17th European Fusion Theory Conference (EFTC) 2017 in Athens and presented his results through a poster presentation titled “Modelling of Alfvén modes properties in TJ-II plasmas“.
“Discussions with expert European fusion scientists and young fellows were very interesting and fruitful for my PhD studies“, commented Allah Rakha afterwards.
Recently, we have been honoured to receive a visit by Dr. Sergei Sharapov from Culham Center for Fusion Energy, UK, to BSC under the Severo Ochoa mobility programme. Sergei visited us for two weeks from the 23rd of October to the 3rd of November, 2017 to collaborate on the modelling of Alfvenic instabilities in the TJ-II discharges.
During his stay he also delivered a Severo Ochoa Research Seminar entitled “Magnetic nuclear fusion and fast ion driven Alfvén instabilities” in the UPC-Nord Campus organized by BSC.