A new collaboration among researchers at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, and the Energy Sciences Network aims to accelerate research on nuclear fusion as a viable energy source.
The team has developed a multi-institution scientific environment called Superfacility that connects resources from DIII-D and NERSC via the ESnet6, the latest iteration of the Department of Energy’s high-speed data network ESnet, General Atomics, host of the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, said Monday.
The Superfacility model utilizes NERSC’s high-performance computing — a.k.a. HPC — and DIII-D’s diagnostic suite to send data from fusion experiments to the Perlmutter supercomputer, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction and large-scale automated analysis of plasma pulses.
“To achieve the goal of fusion, all available resources, including HPC, need to be applied to the analysis of present fusion experiments to be able to extrapolate to future fusion power plants,” said Sterling Smith, the project lead for the DIII-D team involved in the Superfacility effort.
“The use of HPC accelerates advanced analyses so that they can feed into the scientific understanding of fusion and point us toward the solutions needed to realize fusion energy production,” Smith added.