Theory Weekly Highlights for November 1999

November 12, 1999

The GATO code was successfully ported to a DEC alpha workstation. In the process of porting, several significant enhancements in the code were merged. The new workstation version is much faster on all platforms, and the same version now runs with only a one line change on the CRAY J90, SGI Octane, and DEC alpha. A new restart facility, and some enhancements in the graphical output are now being added and the completed new version should be available publicly some time in December. Merging with the version in which the ballooning phase factor is extracted on each flux surface should be done early in the new year.

An improved version of MFIT/EFIT has been installed on PPPL alpha workstations to support the NSTX coaxial helicity injection (CHI) experiments. Lang Lao also remotely participate in part of the CHI experiments to help with running of MFIT/EFIT.

An important part of the EFITViewer, diagnostic overlays, has been made customizable. The tool can now be more easily adapted to Tokamaks other than DIII-D.

November 05, 1999

The DCON code developed by Alan Glasser (LANL) has now been successfully benchmarked against GATO for n=1 kink modes for two cases, a moderate beta circular equilibrium and a limiter boundary Dee shape. In both cases, a scan in toroidal field was performed which resulted in alternating stable and unstable bands and the agreement between GATO and DCON was excellent. Plans are underway to benchmark diverted boundary equilibria and higher n modes. The DCON code is an extremely fast stability tool which provides yes/no answers to whether an equilibrium is kink stable or not, so is suitable for large parameter scans and is already coupled to the CORSICA 1 1/2 D transport code.

The DIII-D MDSplus EFIT tree structure was explained and provided to Steve Sabbagh and Phyllis Roney at PPPL for NSTX EFIT runs. Sharing a common EFIT tree structure will enable both sites to more easily exchange EFIT data, and to share data viewing tools of common interest.



Disclaimer
These highlights are reports of research work in progress and are accordingly subject to change or modification