Gregorio Trevisan started his ORAU postdoctoral assignment at GA this week to work on development of 3D equilibrium reconstruction and 3D MHD computational tools and their applications to analyze DIII-D and other tokamak Resonant Magnetic Perturbation and disruption mitigation experiments.

A comprehensive module developed by David Eldon (PPPL) and David Green (ORNL) to set up, execute, and post-process scrape-off layer simulations from the SOLPS code has been implemented in OMFIT. The module can run the B2.5 standalone or the B2.5+Eirene coupled version of SOLPS. A convenient graphical interface allows editing of the model boundary conditions, transport coefficients and other key simulation parameters. The module also seamlessly supports the code’s ability to restart a completed run, and thus incrementally progress towards the achievement of a converged solution. All of the SOLPS outputs are gathered within the OMFIT tree data structure and, at the click of a button, users can interactively visualize and customize quantities in 2D, as well as plot them as function of time and space. The module implementation supports single and double null equilibria. An interface to NERSC’s TaskFarmer technology allows the convenient spawning of multiple instances of SOLPS to be executed in parallel. Multiple runs can then be managed, analyzed and compared all within the OMFIT module. Current development is focusing on easing the simulation setup for DIII-D shots as well as automating the inference of the transport coefficients given a set of experimentally observed profiles.

A team of researchers from UCSD, MIT, and General Atomics received a 2016 ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge award to carry out multiscale gyrokinetic simulations in current and future H-mode plasmas. Entitled “Multiscale Gyrokinetic Simulation of Reactor Relevant Tokamak Discharges: Understanding the Implications of Cross-Scale Turbulence Coupling in ITER and Beyond”, this awards provides 110,000,000 processor-hours at the NERSC and Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facilities, which will enable multiscale simulations spanning ion-to-electron gyroradius scales of ITER, DIII-D, and Alcator C-Mod H-mode plasmas. The goal of these simulations is to test whether previous findings of significant cross-scale coupling in multiscale simulations of C-Mod L-mode plasmas maintain in these H-mode conditions. They will also test TGLF predictions of significant multiscale transport in DIII-D ITER baseline scenario plasmas performed as part of DIII-D milestone 191, and ITER hybrid plasmas performed as part of the 2015 Theory milestone. Initial results will be presented at the 2016 EU TTF and IAEA FEC meetings.