This is a website for an H2020 project which concluded in 2019 and established the core elements of EOSC. The project's results now live further in www.eosc-portal.eu and www.egi.eu

Fusion research

The Fusion Research Community of plasma physicists, engineers, materials scientists and robotics specialists have a clear but ambitious goal: to develop nuclear fusion technologies as a clean, abundant and inexhaustible source of energy for the future of all mankind.

The work, so far scattered across many individual groups and experiments, is ramping up towards the advent of ITER – the largest fusion experiment ever to have been attempted, now under construction in Southern France with the support of a consortium of 7 international partners (including all countries in EURATOM), including all G8 nations.

The Challenge

Once operational, in full operation, ITER will generate up to 2PB of raw data per day, more than all the existing European tokamaks put together and more than JET (currently the largest tokamak) has produced in its 35 year history. The engineering, modelling and experimental data will have to be shared between institutions, stored and analysed whilst maintaining provenance regarding its creation. The challenges are ambitious, and cover both high performance computing needs and federated data management - essential for such a high profile international project. These are exaggerated by the increasing need for high resolution multi-scale modelling and coupling of these models to the engineering design of future fusion plants. This means that both next generation computing and storage technologies must be in place long before the generation of the first ITER plasma.

The goal of the Fusion Research Community Competence Centre is to demonstrate the benefits of making open data more readily accessible to members of the fusion community to allow more synergistic research to take place. 

Workplan

As an EOSC-hub Competence Centre, the Fusion Research Community will focus upon the following issues:

  • Federated data storage: to investigate integration of the ITER Unified Data Access (UDA) service with B2SAFE and OneData.  Initially data will be copied from existing repositories into B2SAFE and replicated between two sites (PSNC and STFC), but we also intend to add CINECA as a third replica to allow fast access to HPC facilities making use of B2STAGE.
  • Cloud Computing: to assess the feasibility of running IMAS workflows on cloud resource, assess EGI Cloud Compute as an option. The team will also investigate the orchestration and container functionalities developed by INDIGO-DataCloud, specifically INDIGO-Dynpart and udocker.
  • Federated Authentication and Authorization: to investigate the security services offered by the EOSC-hub consortium (EGI Check-in, B2ACCESS, INDIGO-IAM) as possible solutions to create a common AAI.

The work will proceed in three stages: proof of concept, pilot and production. By the end of EOSC-hub, the Fusion Research Community will have a system in place to address short and medium-term requirements. The project will also deliver a powerful tool for demonstrating and promoting the use of cross-national compute resources and data management tools to their stakeholders and funders.