Description

A team led by C.S. Chang of Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory is committed to delivering a more powerful tool for exploring the feasibility of sustainable fusion in a tokamak fusion reactor, the donut-shaped device being built by ITER. By using Summit, Chang’s team expects its highly scalable XGC code, a first-principles code that models the reactor and its magnetically confined plasma, could be simulated 10 times faster than current supercomputers allow. Such a speedup would give researchers an opportunity to model more complicated plasma edge phenomena, such as plasma turbulence and particle interactions with the reactor wall, at finer scales, leading to insights that could help ITER plan operations more effectively.