On 18 May 2019, the ITER Organization and the European agency for ITER, Fusion for Energy, organized the 14th ITER Open Doors Day with more than 800 visitors.
The ITER Open Doors Day is a great opportunity to learn more about the ITER Project and to tour the massive construction works currently underway in Caradache, France. The event is free to charge and is divided into two parts.
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.
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.
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.
Last week the Annual Retreat of the CASE department of BSC, to which the Fusion group belongs, was held in Altafulla, Tarragona, Spain. The event lasted two days and gathered the group members in a relaxing environment at the Mediterranean seaside. Prof. José María Cela, head of the Department, presented an overview of the current situation of CASE and the future research paths to be developed within the team. Later, the two spin-offs stemming from CASE, MITIGA and Elem Biotech, were introduced showing how our research can reach the market.
The 6th BSC Doctoral Symposium took place last week in the campus of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. Over the three days the event lasted, numerous students and postdoc researchers presented their work on a wide range of areas related to Computing: from simulations in Fusion, Bio-engineering, Data Analysis and Machine Learning to HPC techniques and algorithms in Computer Science.