Project: EUFORIA
EUFORIA (EU fusion for ITER Applications)is a European-funded project that aims to provide HPC and Grid resources to the European fusion research community. It will provide European fusion scientists with the simulation modelling tools and platforms that they will need to obtain experimental time on ITER.
EPCC is involved in three areas of work in EUFORIA: optimisation and parallelisation of fusion codes, user support and training. We will be using HECToR, the new UK high-end computing resource, for code development and parallelisation.
ITER is the next generation of fusion devices designed to show that fusion can be used as a sustainable energy source for the future. ITER is an international collaboration between the European Union, Japan, the People’s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA. When the ITER machine is complete there will be a high level of competition for research access. Every application will have to be supported by full-scale predictive modelling of the event that is being investigated. This means that European fusion scientists have a need for high-quality simulation codes, and access to resources that can run such simulations, in order to be able to continue fusion research at a world-leading level.
Whilst we have a range of good fusion codes in Europe, most of these do not address the size or type of simulations required for a device as large as ITER, and when they do they require significant computational resources. Currently, access to computing resources for simulation and modelling relies on local or national resources, which does not support the pan-European modelling activity that will be required for ITER experiment applications and results analysis. EUFORIA will provide access to Grid and HPC resources for European fusion scientists, and software development effort to ensure that their simulation codes are able to run ITER-scale simulations. The goal is to bring together local code development and modelling activities, along with compute resources, to help refine the physics and modelling capabilities of European fusion physics.
Not only will EUFORIA focus on improving simulation and modelling of core and edge transport, and turbulence within the plasma, it also aims to provide the technology and development effort to couple modelling codes to allow more complex, and therefore more detailed, simulations to be performed. The ability to simultaneously run models, which work on different areas of the plasma physics and are coupled together (so they communicate data), enables scientists to perform much more realistic modelling, and therefore produce much better results. Ultimately EUFORIA aims to allow scientists to use both Grid and HPC resources within the same simulation, choosing the computational resources that match the computational modules required for a simulation, and orchestrating them into a single workflow.
As well as providing code development effort and access to computing resources, EUFORIA includes work on visualisation and data analysis tools to allow researchers to better interact with, and analyse, simulation results.
EUFORIA began in 2008 and will run for 3 years.
Euforia Project Website
