In the frame of his three-year EUROfusion Engineering Grant (2018-2020), our group member Albert Gutiérrez has visited the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSCN), Poland, from the 14th to 18th of October. During his visit Albert worked closely with the EUROfusion Core Programming Team (CPT) member Tomasz Żok on the performance and integration of fusion codes on virtualized environments.
Between September 16th and October 11th, our group member Ignacio López de Arbina worked at the ITER Organization headquarters under the Severo Ochoa Mobility Program of Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC).
Ignacio works to integrate the PION code in the IMAS infrastructure developed within the Work Package Code Development (WPCD) of the EUROfusion Consortium. PION is an Ion Cyclotron Range of Frequencies (ICRF) heating code which is widely used in our group and the European fusion community to model the power deposition of the launched electromagnetic waves in the plasma. IMAS stands for the ITER Integrated Modeling & Analysis Suit. This is a software infrastructure that the fusion community is developing at ITER to allow and ease the integrated modelling, that is the simultaneous and self-consistent calculations between the different codes that model a fusion experiment.
In the second week of October, our group member Dr. Allah Rakha participated in the 18th European Fusion Theory Conference (EFTC), which is one of the world leading fusion theory conferences, and delivered an oral talk titled ‘Shear Alfvén wave continuum spectrum with bifurcated helical core equilibria’.
In his discourse, he presented the modelling results of Alfvén continuum calculations due to helical core equilibria in the ASDEX Upgrade tokamak plasmas, which he had obtained using stellarator community 3D numerical tools. This year, the conference took place at Ghent University, Belgium on October 7-10, 2019.
The opening Severo Ochoa Seminar of this month at BSC has been devoted to fusion. The guest speaker was David Taylor, the responsible officer of the CHAIN2 suite of codes at the Joint European Torus (JET), who gave a talk on one of the main modelling tools at JET.
The number of experiments that are carried out at JET during a campaign is huge. Therefore, there is a massive amount of data that needs to be processed and analysed. This is automatised using the so-called CHAIN2.
The realisation of a PhD has been a true adventure. It has been an experience that has helped me to improve in many aspects. It has shown me the path to make real research. I have also learned to seek relevant results for my research topic and, most importantly, I have contributed in a research field that has the potential to change the world. However, this adventure would have not been possible without the supervision and good advice from Prof. Mervi Mantsinen, she does deserve a big thank you.
We are delighted to announce that our group member Allah Rakha has been granted with the title of PhD in physics after successfully defending his dissertation entitled “Analysis of energetic particle-driven Alfvénic instabilities in tokamak and stellarator plasmas using three dimensional numerical tools”.
The evaluation board was composed by five members from five universities and research centers, i.e. EPFL (Switzerland), Ghent University (Belgium), Universidad de Sevilla (Spain), UC3M (Spain) and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC, Spain), to meet the requirement of his co-tutelle PhD programme at Ghent University and UPC. The defence itself took place on September 27, 2019 at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Barcelona (Spain).