DIII-D
The Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy Pathfinder is focused on the use of remote HPC by experiments running at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility at General Atomics in San Diego, CA.
Initial work on this Pathfinder has resulted in dramatic improvements to the Consistent Automatic Kinetic Equilibrium (CAKE) workflow, developed and implemented at DIII-D for producing low error, kinetically constrained magnetic equilibrium reconstructions without human intervention, and to identify strategies for doing so that would be broadly applicable. The automation of CAKE using remote computing at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) has resulted in in 160,000 high quality reconstructions in an 18 month period, compared to 4,000 manual reconstructions in the prior 12 years. This is one example of the ways in which multifacility workflows in the IRI framework can dramatically improve scientific productivity.
The current task for the DIII-D Pathfinder team is to automate the use of the Ion Orbiter (Ion Orb) workflow, which provides fast between-shot identification of vessel wall heating sources, using remote computing at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). Today this module runs in analysis mode doing a wall heating calculation after the shot allowing the scientific team to be aware of potential heat build-up over many pulses. The long-range vision is that personnel in the control room will be able to run this module before a plasma pulse and quickly determine future wall heating so that plasma control adjustments can be made as required. The Ion Orbiter code simulates particle trajectories and determines their hit locations on the tokamak wall.
Both of these workflows will be demonstrated by members of the Plasma Physics and Fusion Energy Pathfinder at the SC24 conference.
