News – Page 17 – Fusion Group

The Fusion Group is getting bigger!

July 10, 2020May 30, 2022

It has been 4 months since the beginning of the confinement. Barcelona was stricken by the CoVid-19 as was the rest of the world. Fortunately, things are getting better and Barcelona ended the confinement the 21st of June together with the rest of Spain. It has been a difficult time for many who have seen their lifestyle seriously affected and their jobs frozen or even worse, cancelled. We still do not know what the economical magnitude of this situation will be or how the world is planning to recover from this.

However, the Fusion Group feels deeply privileged as our work has not been cancelled nor stopped at any point. We have been and are working remotely (from home), following the recommendations of the government. The main European fusion projects under EUROfusion we are working with, JET and AUG, have recently resumed their experimental activities and the modelling efforts have been increased during the confinement. Furthermore, in order to cover all the projects where the Fusion Group is involved, two new researchers have been recruited: Dr. Francisco Fernández and Dr. Julio Gutiérrez. They will work within the Ris3Cat FusionCAT project.

Farewells at EUROfusion Summer Code Camp

July 2, 2020

DIFFER (Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research) building. Source differ.nl

The EUROfusion Work Package Code Development (WPCD) Summer Code Camp, scheduled to be hosted by DIFFER (Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research) in Eindhoven, Netherlands, went finally online due to the COVID-19 crisis during the two weeks from the 8th to 19th June, 2020. The first week of the Code Camp was focused on the Enabling Workflow Exploitation (EWE) programme while during the second week, several working sessions were organized, among others, about the adaptation of workflows in ITER Integrated Modelling & Analysis Suite (IMAS).

Mark the date! Join us at the European Fusion Teacher Day 2020

June 15, 2020June 15, 2020

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), the European agency Fusion for Energy (F4E) and b_TEC Foundation invite all Secondary and High-school teachers to take part in a live webinar, coordinated by the European Fusion Education Network FuseNet, with connections in Catalan and Spanish from Barcelona and English from several spots in Europe on the 2nd of October 2020.

The webinar will aim at giving teachers the tools and knowledge they need in order to introduce fusion in the classrooms. Such state-of-the-art concepts can certainly be hard to introduce into schools, thus we truly think this is a fantastic opportunity to learn how to do it.

Welcome to MARCONI100, a new tool for fusion research

June 11, 2020June 11, 2020

MARCONI 100 (M100) is the new accelerated cluster acquired by CINECA, Italy, within PPI4HPC European initiative. MI100 is based on the IBM Power9 architecture with NVIDIA Volta GPUs and has a peak performance of 32 Pflops.

M100 became available in May 2020 to the European public and industrial researchers. In particular, the access to M100 is granted to users with approved projects for this platform (EUROfusion, PRACE, European HPC programs,…). EUROfusion community has 80 dedicated nodes of M100, which means a peak performance of 2.5 Pflops, to run fusion codes and boost the research in this field.

M100 opens the way to the pre-exascale Leonardo Supercomputer expected to be installed in 2021.

Major milestone reached with the fusion megaproject

June 4, 2020

On May 26, the base of the ITER cryostat was successfully mounted onto its supporting structure in the Tokamak assembly pit. The 1250-tonne component was lifted from it’s mounting frame, carried across the Assembly hall and finally lowered into the pit, culminating a ten-year process to design, manufacture, deliver, assemble and weld one of the most crucial components of the ITER machine.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the most ambitious energy project in the world, bringing together 35 different countries in the effort of producing clean energy for the generations to come. It is designed to demonstrate the feasibility of confinement nuclear fusion and develop the science and technology needed for a future nuclear power plant. After years and years of preparation, the international project officially started in 2007 and has since been building one of the most gargantuan research sites ever envisioned. According to the schedule, the first plasmas are expected in 2025.

Fusion experiments during the times of COVID-19

May 29, 2020May 30, 2020

View from ASDEX Upgrade Control Room during Covid-19. Source: IPP, Volker Rohde

Our BSC Fusion Group works closely with various experimental fusion devices on the design, preparation, execution, analysis and modelling of new plasma experiments. We are particularly interested in validating and testing our modelling codes against experimental data, and in using our codes for the design of new experiments.

As experimental activities in many fields of science, fusion experiments have been strongly affected by the present COVID-19 outbreak.