Section: Application Domains

High performance simulation dedicated to ITER project

Participants : Rémi Abgrall, Pierre Ramet [ Corresponding member ] .

Numerical simulation has become a major tool for the study of many physical phenomena involving charged particles, in particular beam physics, space and laboratory plasmas including fusion plasmas. Moreover, it is a subject of interest to figure out and optimize physics experiments in the present fusion devices and also to design future reactors like in the ITER project. Parallelism is required to carry on numerical simulations for realistic test cases.

We have established a collaboration with the physicists of the CEA/DRFC group in the context of the ANR CIS 2006 project called ASTER (Adaptive MHD Simulation of Tokamak Elms for iteR). The magneto-hydrodynamic instability called ELM for Edge Localized Mode is commonly observed in the standard tokamak operating scenario. The energy losses the ELM will induce in ITER plasmas are a real concern. However, the current understanding of what sets the size of these ELM induced energy losses is extremely limited. No numerical simulations of the complete ELM instability, from its onset through its non-linear phase and its decay, are referenced in literature. Recently, encouraging results on the simulation of an ELM cycle have been obtained with the JOREK code developed at CEA but at reduced toroidal resolution. The JOREK code uses a fully implicit time evolution scheme in conjunction with the PaStiX sparse matrix library.