{"id":92948,"date":"2025-12-04T15:36:21","date_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:36:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/?p=92948"},"modified":"2025-12-04T15:36:21","modified_gmt":"2025-12-04T14:36:21","slug":"eurofusion-hpc-achs-meet-at-epfl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/2025\/12\/04\/eurofusion-hpc-achs-meet-at-epfl\/","title":{"rendered":"EUROfusion HPC ACHs meet at EPFL"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

On November 25\u201326, the 3rd<\/sup> Annual Meeting of EUROfusion HPC ACHs took place in Lausanne<\/strong> (Switzerland), hosted by EPFL<\/a>, further consolidating the series of yearly gatherings. The BSC-CIEMAT ACH was represented by fusion group members Alejandro Soba<\/strong>, Federico Cipolletta<\/strong>, Augusto Maidana<\/strong> and Xavier S\u00e1ez<\/strong>, together with Joan Vinyals<\/strong> from the Best Practices for Performance and Portability (BPPP) group, actively contributing to the discussions and technical exchange throughout the event. This third edition has confirmed that this yearly event among ACHs has been an important step toward sharing results, lessons learned, and jointly planning future work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The EUROfusion Advanced Computing Hubs (ACHs) are teams dedicated to supporting European fusion physicists<\/strong> to improve the performance of their simulation codes (for example, by parallelizing them, porting them to GPUs, optimizing algorithms, etc.).<\/p>\n

As these hubs are distributed across different countries (Finland, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland), the annual meetings have become a key coordination space within EUROfusion<\/strong>, supporting knowledge exchange between the different hubs and aligning efforts to find solutions to common challenges across them. Additionally, each edition typically rotates the host location among the different hubs, taking the opportunity to visit local facilities (computing centers, fusion laboratories, etc.) and to strengthen the collaboration network between institutions.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Xavier S\u00e1ez gave the talk “Status of BIT1 Porting to GPU and Progress on X-tork”.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The two-day meeting featured concise technical updates from all ACHs<\/strong>. EPFL ACH<\/a> presented progress on GPU porting, portable libraries for exascale simulations, improvements in plasma turbulence modeling, data-handling optimization, modernization of legacy codes and implementation on visualization tools. The BSC-CIEMAT ACH<\/a> team reported advances in hybrid parallelization, support for multiple fusion codes, performance monitoring tools and GPU acceleration for plasma\u2013wall interaction and gyrokinetic applications.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Joan Vinyals gave the talk “Analysis and optimization memory requirements for STELLA (and) Continuous performance monitoring for GVEC”.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

On the second day, the IPP-MPG ACH<\/a> hub provided updates on HPC infrastructure benchmarking, numerical enhancements in key plasma physics codes and new approaches for RF simulations. Contributions from VTT-Finland ACH<\/a> covered scalable Monte-Carlo methods for neutral transport and performance studies of OpenMP GPU offloading. The complete meeting agenda and all presentation files are available on the event\u2019s Indico page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In addition to the technical sessions, participants had the opportunity to visit the TCV tokamak at the Swiss Plasma Center facilities (SPC)<\/strong>. The Tokamak \u00e0 Configuration Variable (TCV) is one of Europe\u2019s most versatile experimental fusion devices due to its flexibility in setting its plasma shape.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Tour of the TCV tokamak at the SPC: left, cross-section model of the tokamak; right, view of the tokamak hall.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The tour included a demonstration of the \u201cHelios\u201d project, which is a compact platform capable of producing Neon and Argon plasmas, with the possibility of applying a longitudinal magnetic field to visualize how plasma propagates along magnetic field lines.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Helios project demo showing how Neon plasma travels along magnetic field lines.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The programme also featured a guided visit to EPFL\u2019s thermal power plant<\/strong>, located on the same Lausanne campus. Built in 1978 to draw thermal energy from Lake Geneva, the installation supplies cooling and heating for the campus and also cools the Data Center. After a major renovation, the plant now operates fully without oil, reducing EPFL\u2019s carbon emissions and showcasing a successful example of sustainable energy technology.<\/p>\n

Finally, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to EPFL for their excellent organisation<\/strong> and warm hospitality throughout the event. We hope to see you at the next event in Garching<\/strong>, Germany!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On November 25\u201326, the 3rd Annual Meeting of EUROfusion HPC ACHs took place in Lausanne (Switzerland), hosted by EPFL, further consolidating the series of yearly gatherings. The BSC-CIEMAT ACH was represented by fusion group members Alejandro Soba, Federico Cipolletta, Augusto Maidana and Xavier S\u00e1ez, together with Joan Vinyals from the Best Practices for Performance and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,1,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group","category-news","category-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92948"}],"version-history":[{"count":43,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92948\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92998,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92948\/revisions\/92998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fusion.bsc.es\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}