WORKSHOP || Code of the Month Vol. 17 – EoCoE

Fusion research is in full swing. Various concepts have been proposed for confining extremely hot plasmas (several hundred million degrees) long enough to produce energy from fusion reactions. Among these concepts, the tokamak is currently the most promising and has been chosen for the international ITER project currently under construction on the Cadarache site in the south of France. The success of this project depends in particular on understanding and predicting the turbulent transport of particles and heat within the plasma.
Tokamak plasmas are not very collisional and therefore require a kinetic description. In addition, plasma confinement increases sharply with the ratio between the size of the machine and the size of the turbulent structures. However, a good description of the confinement requires simulation of all the scales present. So the numerical cost of simulating a tokamak plasma is significant and increases with its quality.
The GYSELA code is used to model turbulent transport in tokamak plasmas. We will look at the capabilities of the current code through a few examples and discuss the limitations of the code. We will see that the development of a new code is necessary, both to improve the physical model and to increase the size of the simulated plasmas. This new code will make it possible to use Exascale supercomputers that will be needed to model ITER plasmas.

CASTIEL 2 has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101102047. The JU receives support from the European Union's Digital Europe Programme and Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, Austria, Estonia.