Talk

4th Fusion HPC Workshop

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:

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FuseNet Teacher Day 2023

Teacher Day 2023 announcement

The FuseNet Teacher Day is an annual event organized by FuseNet which closes the gap between research/industry and high school education. Its main purpose is to motivate students in the rich field of fusion physics and technology. It is typically addressed to professors, who receive a nice set of educational material and a gentle overview of fusion technology on the shoulders of the main research labs in each European country. 

We are happy at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to organize together with Fusion for Energy (F4E) the Catalan session, as done in previous editions (see here). This year the session has been covered by Dr Ferran Albajar (F4E) and Dr Dani Gallart (BSC). The Catalan session, which typically lasts 1 hour, is entirely devoted to the understanding of the key features and advantages that fusion technology has to offer. We also elaborate on the educational materials available and after that we engage in an interesting and enthusiastic discussion with all the audience. We appreciate the interest and the time that professors invest in our talk, and we hope all the material and motivation we try to send during the session is useful and ultimately transferred to the students. The students are the future of our society and so, of fusion technology as well. 

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Disseminating our research in Fusion at the 16a Festa de la Ciència

On Saturday, June 10, took place the 16a Festa de la ciència in the Rambla of Prim of Barcelona. More than 6000 assistants came to this science dissemination event organized by the Ajuntament of Barcelona and counted with  176 activities and engaged more than 150 city entities related to science and dissemination. As last year, our Fusion Group participated to disseminate Fusion technology among the event participants.

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Breaking Barriers: Launch of OECD-NEA Report on Improving Gender Balance in Nuclear Sector

Credit: OECD/NEA

On March 8, coinciding with the International Women’s Day, our group attended the webinar “Improving gender balance in the nuclear sector: Report launch“ organized by the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The nuclear industry is a crucial part of our energy infrastructure, providing a significant portion of the world’s electricity. However, the sector has traditionally been male-dominated, with women making up only a small fraction (less than 25%) of the workforce. The same applies to its sub-sectors including fusion where our group belongs.

In the webinar on March 8, a report was launched to address the issue of gender imbalance in the nuclear sector. The report provides insights and recommendations based on the first publicly available international data on gender balance in the nuclear sector. The data was collected from over 8 000 women in the nuclear workforce in 32 countries, as well as human resources data from 96 nuclear organisations in 17 countries. Based on the findings, a comprehensive, evidence-driven policy framework is proposed with practical recommendations.

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JOREK code meeting at ITER with a guided tour of the construction site

This Lego model is currently held at the ITER Headquarters and represents a section along the meridional plane of symmetry of the ITER Tokamak.

In the week of 13th of March 2023, the 2023-03 JOREK Meeting took place at ITER. The JOREK code is one MHD code capable of modeling the plasma evolution and instabilities inside a Tokamak, and it is currently developed by a large community interested in plasma physics and actively used inside the ITER project.

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Recent MAGNET validations on AC losses presented at the Ewing Event ’22 “The Road to Fusion”

The Ewing Event is an event held yearly by the UK Magnetics Society with a different theme related to magnets every year. This year the topic was The Road to Fusion.  From all applications of magnetic technology, nuclear fusion offers perhaps the greatest potential benefit. The ability to generate emission-free electricity from abundant fuels has been a dream for centuries and an achievable goal for decades. The yearly event looked at the different routes to commercial fusion.

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