The 47th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics took place virtually on 21-25 June 2021. This conference brought together top researchers in the wide field of plasma physics ranging from nuclear fusion to low temperature, astrophysical and laser plasmas.
The numbers speak for themselves of the success of the conference: more than 700 registered participants, 187 talks and 432 live poster presentations.
The EUROfusion consortium will invest a total of € 59.8 million in nineteen research projects in their Work Plan 2021-2025 to strengthen understanding and predicting of fusion processes in the European fusion programme. One of these projects will benefit from the expertise at Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to improve the computational conditions for fusion energy.
Prior to this EUROfusion investment, BSC already holds two reference HPC performance groups in Europe, i.e. the PRACE High-Level Support Team (HLST) and the Performance Optimisation and Productivity Centre of Excellence (POP CoE). The new EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hub (ACH) will become the third one. The PRACE HLST, POP CoE and BSC Fusion group members played a key role in building the winning proposal, thus making BSC one of the three reference European teams in HPC performance for fusion. The BSC ACH will include 8 full-time team members with secured funds until 2025.
We are glad to announce that a joint EU-Japan HPC project led by the BSC Fusion Group’s researcher Julio Gutiérrez has been recently granted 350K node-h (14,000,000 core-h). The project will run over one year on the Japan Fusion Reactor Simulator (JFRS-1), located at the Computational Simulation Centre of the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC-CSC) in Rokkasho (Aomori, Japan).
As in its previous editions, our Fusion Group is contributing several lectures to the fusion course imparted within the Nuclear Engineering MSc at UPC. The course gives an overview of plasma physics and fusion technology, presenting a broad scope of topics. The topics are taught by experts in each of the fusion fields covered, with external lecturers mainly provided by Fusion for Energy (F4E) and our Fusion Group at BSC.
The BSC Fusion Group’s researcher Dr Julio Gutiérrez presented our recent progress on the FusionCAT project work on “Large-scale ab-initio study of tungsten metal from linear-scaling density functional theory methods” at the American Chemical Society’s (ACS) Division Computers in Chemistry (COMP) Symposium on Materials Science focused on Method Development/Machine Learning/Material Properties (Paper ID 3529923). The presentation took place on April 5 and it is available on-demand between April 19-30 on the conference web platform.
We are looking for researchers in computational physics, computers science, engineering or related fields to join our Fusion group (fusion.bsc.es) at the Department of Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (CASE) of Barcelona Supercomputing Center. The objective of our group is to enhance modelling capabilities in fusion by code development, validation, integration and optimization including the use of advanced HPC techniques.
We work closely towards the objectives of EUROfusion (www.euro-fusion.org), the European fusion research programme for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, in collaboration with Fusion for Energy (F4E), ITER, International Tokamak Physics Activity, and the Spanish national fusion laboratory CIEMAT. Given the number of projects we are involved in, we have the possibility to match our project needs and the candidate interests and profile when deciding on the tasks to be carried out.
Please check here for more details and for a link to send in your application.