Visit to the interior of the ITER fusion reactor

2024-02-12

Visit to the interior of the ITER fusion reactor

Representatives of the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center took part in a meeting organised at the headquarters of the ITER Organisation (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor), prepared by the management of the TSVV11 (Theory, Simulation, Validation and Verification) EUROfusion and the Dutch eScience Centre. During the meeting, participants had the opportunity to take a closer look at the world’s largest fusion reactor.

ITER is the world’s largest fusion reactor and the associated international research programme to explore the possibility of large-scale energy production from controlled thermonuclear fusion. The aim of the meeting, held in France, was to discuss the latest advances in the design and testing of models that help us understand and predict the behaviour of the plasma in fusion reactors, which is incredibly important for future energy production.

Participants shared progress on their in activities, participated in technical discussions and learned how to use specific software tools related to plasma modelling. The PSNC delegation also held several meeting sessions.

Michał Owsiak presented a report summarising PSNC activities in four different fusion projects in which our Center is involved. He presented new technologies that have been developed or implemented in the scientific fusion ecosystem. Bartłomiej Pogodzinski led a discussion on the use of the UDA server (Universal Data Access), which allows remote download of fusion data from any server in Europe, and its future in the context of the use of SSL and integration with Keycloak. Agata Filipczak and Bartosz Palak presented a session on the iWrap tool, developed specifically for ITER by Bartek Palak and Jędrzej Wasik. It is a new tool in the Fusion community, for which Agata Filipczak prepared and presented a tutorial during the session.

The huge building demonstrates the scale of the project. What is most impressive, according to our representatives, is the size of the reactor itself – 16 metres wide and 11 metres high.

The genesis of the project is shown in the video below.