The year 2024 has started with the opportunity for two new Master students to carry out their MSc thesis research projects in our Fusion group. Their internships will last between six and eight months during which they will be able to have a first-hand experience with one of the most powerful supercomputers worldwide, the MareNostrum 5, in a hot timely topic such as nuclear fusion.
The tridimensional All-ORder Spectral Algorithm (AORSA-3D) has been adapted to run on the supercomputer MareNostrum, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS). AORSA-3D is designed to study the plasma-wave interaction inside the 3D volume of a stellarator. Its model provides fully three-dimensional solutions of the integral wave equation for Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) in three-dimensional stellarator plasmas. Its algorithm is based on combining multiple periodic solutions for individual helical field periods in order to obtain complete 3-D wave solutions valid over the entire volume of the stellarator for an arbitrary antenna geometry.
We are looking for Research Engineers in Scientific Computing to join the growing team of the EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC)
The successful candidates will participate in cutting-edge European R&D activities related to the optimization and programming of codes devoted to simulation-based plasma physics science and fusion technology. They will become members of this reference performance group in an international working environment.
From the 10th of April to the 13th of May, one of the members of our Fusion group, Tomas Bensadon, went on a research stay to the ITER Organization (IO) Headquarters in Cadarache, France. The research stay took place as an internship, under the 2022- INTERN-SCOP06- ICRH modelling in various scenarios of the ITER Research Plan program. This internship was made possible by the BSC Mobility Program, which was awarded to Tomas Bensadon on August 2022.
The DIII-D National Fusion Facility, located in San Diego, California, is the largest magnetic fusion research facility in the United States and is operated by General Atomics for the US Department of Energy. This facility plays an important role in optimizing the tokamak approach to fusion energy production since the mid-1980s and provides valuable data for the engineering design phase of ITER.
DIII-D has recently been in the news because has completed a two-year research campaign that resulted in a record-breaking 1,600 hours of plasma research and 140 groundbreaking studies, leading to many transformative advancements for delivering cost-effective fusion energy.
On 14th of March, our group attended an AI for Good webinar organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) entitled “AI for advancing fusion energy through enhancing simulation”. The talk was delivered by Dr. Michael Churchill from the Princeton’s Plasma Physics Laboratory. The main scope of the webinar was focused on the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in advancing sustainable development goals, specifically towards fusion energy as well as the potential of AI in enhancing simulation and accelerating research and development (R&D) in nuclear fusion.