Fusion Group participates in PRACEdays17 and wins the best poster award

Felipe Nathan de Oliveira receives the PRACE Best Poster award.

From May the 15th to the 18th, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center held the European HPC Summit Week 2017 and the PRACEdays17, an event focused on the usage of High Performance Computing in the industry and the academia.

We are particularly pleased to report that our Master student Felipe Nathan de Oliveira won the PRACE award for the best poster. His work entitled “Nonlinear electromagnetic stabilization of ITG micro-turbulence by ICRF-driven fast ions in ASDEX Upgrade” was short-listed for the presentation on May the 16th with other two candidates.

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BSC Fusion group improves the performance of fusion codes for EUROfusion

On 20 April 2017, our Fusion group researcher Xavier Sáez visited the Max-Planck-Institut für Plasmaphysik, Garching, Germany, to participate in the bi-annual meeting of the EUROfusion High Level Support Team (HLST).

Xavier presented the work developed in the group to improve the performance of SFINCS and FELTOR codes. SFINCS is a novel drift-kinetic solver which can be used to predict neoclassical flows in 3D magnetic configurations while FELTOR solves 3D full-F gyrofluid model equations with discontinuous Galerkin method.

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BSC Fusion Group teams up to win a PRACE supercomputer project

The project ZONALGENE, led by Dr Jeronimo Garcia (CEA, France), has been awarded with computing time amongst the 117 proposals submitted in the 14th Call for PRACE Project Access. Our fusion group  will collaborate in this project to perform non-linear analysis of zonal flow generation in magnetically confined plasmas on the new MareNostrum supercomputer at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).

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Farewell to Helios

Helios supercomputer (photo: Bull).

It is time to say goodbye to the Helios supercomputer located in the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC) in Rokkasho, Japan, hosted by the Japanese Atomic Energy Authority (JAEA).

From 2011 to 2016 Helios was one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers with a peak performance of more than 1.5 Petaflop/s. Its main goal was to give scientists the opportunity to perform complex calculations in plasma physics.

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Our research stays at the world’s largest fusion device with EUROfusion

Areal view of the JET site (photo: ccfe.ac.uk).

Our fusion group members Dani Gallart and Mervi Mantsinen are currently stationed at the JET tokamak, the world’s largest fusion device located at the Culham Science Center, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom.

At JET, Dani and Mervi are taking part in the EUROfusion modelling and analysis tasks in the preparation of the next campaigns. In particular, they are working to improve the preparedness of fusion simulation codes to simulate plasmas with tritium.

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