The XXXVII Biennial Meeting of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics (RSEF) was held last week (15th-19th July) in Zaragoza (Spain). The conference attracted more than 500 physicists working in a broad variety of disciplines, giving an overview to many research topics and research carried out in Spain in physics.
This year, the 46th European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics (EPS2019) was held in Milan (Italy), from July 8 to 12, 2019. This annual conference is organized by the European Physical Society (EPS) Plasma Physics Division, and it covers the wide field of plasma physics from Magnetic Confinement Fusion Plasma, Beam Plasmas & Intertial Fusion, Low Temperature and Dusty Plasmas to Basic, Space & Astrophysical Plasmas. Researchers from all around the world met at this conference to show and explain their work to the growing community of plasma physicists.
On the 24th of June, our group leader Mervi Mantsinen had the honour of being one of the members of the PhD examination committee of Ivana Abramović at the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) current leads are a key technology of the ITER magnet system, transmitting the huge currents (up to 68 kA) from the power supplies at room temperature to the low temperature superconducting coils installed in the fusion reactor. ITER’s large coils will need 60 current leads located at the end of the magnet feeders, thus operating in a lower magnetic field and reducing the heat load compared to conventional current leads. In fact, the higher cost of HTS current leads is by far compensated by the savings in the operation of the cryoplant.
Marta Florido and Adam Teixido, both 4th year bachelor students at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s CFIS programme (Centre de Formació Interdisciplinària Superior), have joined us this summer with an internship program. Both internships are part of the BSC International Summer HPC Internship Programme aims to encourage students to start a research career in our multidisciplinary research center. The Severo Ochoa award funds this Programme.
As customary in previous years, last week the 10th Edition of the PUMPS Summer School (Programming and Tuning Massively Parallel Systems) was held at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC). The course is organized by Barcelona Supercomputing Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, UPC, and HiPEAC Network of Excellence. Our team member José Lorenzo had the opportunity to attend the course.