At a dedicated PDS week at ITER, from 31 August to 4 September, we gave the training on the Pulse Design Simulator, and by the end of it participants were running coupled simulations on ITER’s compute cluster, reconfiguring them, and assembling workflows of their own.

The goal of the Pulse Design Simulator (PDS) is to generate an optimal pulse schedule: to design the scenarios of the ITER Research Plan, and to prepare for ITER operation. It works in two directions. In inverse mode it designs a pulse - working out what the machine would have to do to produce the plasma you asked for. In direct mode it simulates a pulse, controllers included, to see what would actually happen, and checks the result against the operational limits.

It is built on IMAS for data exchange and the MUSCLE3 Persistent Actor Framework for communication between components, with Python as the main development language. It is modular, so its components can be swapped for others, and machine agnostic.

The participants were enthusiastic, and it was a pleasure to see the PDS in the hands of the people it is built for. Our thanks to everyone who took part, and to ITER for hosting the week.

All of the training material is public, so you can work through it yourself:

The documentation of the PDS is publicly available and the source code lives on GitHub. 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.