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).
We are looking for researchers in computational physics, computers science, engineering or related fields to join our Fusion group (fusion.bsc.es) at the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) of Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The objective of our group is to enhance modelling capabilities in fusion by code development, validation, integration and optimization including the use of advanced HPC techniques.
We work closely towards the objectives of EUROfusion (www.euro-fusion.org), the European fusion research programme for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, in collaboration with Fusion for Energy (F4E), ITER, International Tokamak Physics Activity, and the Spanish national fusion laboratory CIEMAT. Given the number of projects we are involved in, we have the possibility to match our project needs and the candidate interests and profile when deciding on the tasks to be carried out.
Please check here for more details and for a link to send in your application.
In December 2020, CINECA‘s School on Numerical Methods for Computational Fluids Dynamics (CFD) moved online for the first time due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemia. This annual PRACE training event gathered top international researchers who presented state-of-the-art fluid simulation models and conducted several practical sessions using specialized parallel codes in Marconi100 and Galileo supercomputers.
The fusion community is living interesting times as the Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) campaign at the Joint European Torus (JET, UK) approaches. This is the type of plasma with the greatest fusion cross section and, therefore, the one with the highest chances of providing commercial fusion energy. This campaign will serve as a testbed for ITER‘s future experiments, the experimental fusion reactor that should provide 10 times the energy which is actually used to operate the machine.
One of the main focus of study for the fusion community is the so-called isotope effect. This is the impact that different atomic masses of the hydrogen (H) isotope, D and T, have on the plasma behaviour, or more precisely, on its confinement. At the moment, such valuable experiments can only be done at JET. There is a big international team conducting these experiments, however, we would like to emphasize in this post the role of some of the Spanish scientists involved in these experiments and, in particular, the role of our Fusion Group members, Mervi Mantsinen and Dani Gallart. The role of these scientists is different in each case, nevertheless, the final goal is always the same, make fusion energy a reality some day.