The BSC Fusion Group recently gained a new doctorate member! The PhD student, Tomas Bensadon, successfully defended his thesis at the beginning of the month, receiving his doctorate degree and thus joining most of the Fusion Group on having this academic certification. The presentation ended a process that started in September 2020, when Tomas joined the Fusion Group as a PhD student.
On the 7th and 8th of May, the members of the group Pau Manyer and Hernán Domingo participated in the 11th International BSC Severo Ochoa Doctoral Symposium 2024, presenting their recent work within the framework of their Master’s Thesis projects. In this event, MSc and PhD students and early postdoctoral scientists have an opportunity to gather together and communicate their research projects to the audience, either in the form of oral or poster presentations. In this edition, more than 40 participants from diverse backgrounds could disseminate their research topics and achievements.
Once again, our Fusion group has not missed the opportunity to contribute to the Fusion Technology Course offered as part of the Nuclear Engineering MSc program at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain. This course provides students with a comprehensive overview of plasma physics and fusion technology, covering various topics delivered by experts in various fusion fields.
In this year’s edition, our group members, Dani Gallart and Xavier Sáez, delivered two lectures that offered insights into our group’s research activity.
On February 29, in the CIEMAT headquarters in Madrid (Spain), a Workshop entitled “Fusión nuclear: iniciativas hacia DEMO” was organized by CIEMAT, CDTI, and Ineustar/Induciencia in close collaboration with IFMIF-DONES, UNED, University of Sevilla (US) and Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Alejandro Soba and Dani Gallart from our research group attended this event.
The main objectives of the workshop were to encourage public-private collaboration initiatives in the field, analyze Spain’s strengths in the different key technologies and discuss the plans for the future DEMO reactor.
From 12/02/2024 to 16/02/2024, the 2024 JOREK code meeting was held at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, organized with the support of Cristian Sommariva and Mengdi Kong from the Swiss Plasma Center (SPC), adopting a hybrid format. The meeting was greatly appreciated by the large community of code users and developers, with over 60 registered people, of which 30 were in-person.
On 29 and 30 November 2023, the Fusion Group at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) actively participated in the yearly workshop regarding research in HPC for Fusion, which has now arrived at its 4th edition.
The Workshop is meant to be a gathering appointment for experts in HPC in the research field of Nuclear Fusion. The covered topics were related to the different ways in which HPC methods and algorithms, spanning across Monte-Carlo methods, Neural Networks, and Parallelization Exploitation, can be extremely valuable for applications, going from the simulation of MHD instabilities to System Analysis, to reach efficient ways of energy production through Nuclear Fusion.
A total of 31 talks have been organized in 11 Zoom Sessions, giving life to an exhaustive program covering all the relevant topics. The 5 keynote talks, of great inspiration for the audience, were: