A consortium led by Ignition Computing, containing CEA and Université Côte d’Azur, has won the contract to develop ITER’s Pulse Design Simulator. It will build on our work in coupled simulators with MUSCLE3, and use the NICE, METIS and TORAX codes, linking them to controllers in MATLAB Simulink.

The international organisation ITER is building the largest tokamak in the world in France. This ‘big science’ project aims to prove useful power generation with nuclear fusion. This multi-billion USD project, built by partners in 35 nations, is one of the most complex machines ever built. Predictive modelling of this massive machine requires the coupling of many simulation tools and is a major challenge.

Most integrated modelling workflow tools use a directed acyclic graph (DAG) to organise operations. For co-simulation purposes, with an unknown number of iterations and many timestep loops, this paradigm is problematic. It is then better to work with semi-autonomous agents which exchange messages with each other, such as implemented in MUSCLE3, the Multiscale Coupling Library and Environment.

We have developed tooling to facilitate distributed simulations with codes in multiple languages, with distributed checkpointing, efficient communication using ITER IMAS IDSes, and support for MATLAB Simulink.

In the coming year we will build on this tooling to develop a Pulse Design Simulator, which will be used to simulate the working of the ITER tokamak. The developed infrastructure will host design simulators of various complexity and speed, tailored to the different use cases for experimental design. It will be used to verify proposed experiments against machine limits, to design better experiments and to inspire further, more detailed, simulation runs.

If you would like to hear more about this project feel free to get in touch!

The opinions expressed in this article are those of Ignition Computing only and do not represent the ITER Organization’s official position.