A consortium of 14 research teams from across Europe has been formed to create a computer simulation of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter) project, to model the technology required to operate it safely.
The European Union (EU)-funded €3.65 million euforia-project will forge a network of high-powered computers with sufficient capacity to undertake this modelling, which will involve massive amounts of data.
“We try to link the different computer architectures such that the strengths of the respective architecture are made use of to the full extent,” Marcus Hardt, project coordinator, from the Karlsruhe Research Centre (FZK) in Germany, told a European Commission note on EUFORIA. Its teams will firstly adapt plasma physics and magnetic confinement fusion codes for use by multiple computer processors, speeding the solution of large problems. Research teams are based in France, Finland, Germany, Italy Spain, Poland, Slovenia, Sweden and Britain, whose participant is the University of Edinburgh.
