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.
The year 2024 has started with the opportunity for two new Master students to carry out their MSc thesis research projects in our Fusion group. Their internships will last between six and eight months during which they will be able to have a first-hand experience with one of the most powerful supercomputers worldwide, the MareNostrum 5, in a hot timely topic such as nuclear fusion.
A recent study examines heat transport in stochastic magnetic fields, focusing on an-isotropic temperature diffusion. This research dives into the differences between parallel and perpendicular thermal conductivity.
The tridimensional All-ORder Spectral Algorithm (AORSA-3D) has been adapted to run on the supercomputer MareNostrum, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS). AORSA-3D is designed to study the plasma-wave interaction inside the 3D volume of a stellarator. Its model provides fully three-dimensional solutions of the integral wave equation for Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating (ICRH) in three-dimensional stellarator plasmas. Its algorithm is based on combining multiple periodic solutions for individual helical field periods in order to obtain complete 3-D wave solutions valid over the entire volume of the stellarator for an arbitrary antenna geometry.
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:
