Past Event: Babuška Forum

Towards exascale grid-based gyrokinetic simulations of fusion plasmas

Gabriele Merlo, Postdoctoral researcher, Oden Institute, UT Austin

Abstract

Turbulent transport is driven by small scale microinstabilities and is ubiquitous in all magnetic confinement devices, constituting one of the main limiting factors towards the feasibility of a fusion reactor. Numerical simulations have played an increasingly important role over the past three decades in understanding the basic processes which lead to the turbulent transport of heat, particles and momentum. This evolution has been made possible thanks to both the development of ever more realistic non-linear “ab initio” gyrokinetic codes, modeling turbulence through the time evolution of particle distributions in an effectively 5-dimensional phase space, as well as to the great technological advances in high performance computing. This talk will present GENE (http://genecode.org), one of the leading grid-based gyrokinetic codes used to model plasma microturbulence. We will in particular discuss recent developments in preparation for the upcoming new exascale supercomputers, which will allow for the first time the simulation of a whole fusion device. Bio Gabriele Merlo has been a postdoctoral research at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin since 2018. He earned a doctorate at the Swiss Plasma Center with a work focused on the comparison between gyrokinetic simulations and experimental measurements of turbulence and transport on the TCV Tokamak, work carried out making extensive use of the GENE code. His current activity is carried out within the Exascale Computing Project and focuses on developing the GENE code for next generation exascale platforms and towards first-principle-based whole device modeling. His expertise is gyrokinetic simulation of plasma microturbulence with grid-based gyrokinetic codes. His interests range from numerical modeling of complex nonlinear physics to advanced modeling of turbulence in plasmas and associated transport.