Computer Weekly, UK-based magazine for global IT professionals with 200,000 plus readers, has published an interview with Novatron Fusion Group exploring how ‘computer simulations’ are advancing the industry.

Like all fusion projects, Novatron Fusion Group has a roadmap that consists of several phases, starting with simulations that allow researchers to validate and fine tune the underlying physics and engineering of the approach and ending with a commercial fusion reactor a decade or so away.   

To simulate the architecture, Novatron Fusion Group relies on specialists in computer simulation and in physical modelling – including Rickard Holmberg, computational physicist and software engineer. The simulation platform utilised most of the time is WarpX, which was written and is maintained by a team of researchers, mainly centered at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“We made some improvements and adaptations to the base WarpX to make it more suited to our needs,” Rickard Holmberg told Computer Weekly. 

The simulation software runs on a very wide range of hardware – from a single GPU on a workstation to large clusters. It runs on both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, and it can use OpenMP and MPI for CPU parallelisation.

Novatron Fusion Group runs more simulations on its own hardware, but sometimes use small cloud resources. “We are looking to expand to large clusters,” added Holmberg. 

Novatron Fusion Group has performed extensive computer verification and stress-test simulations that show the NOVATRON concept is stable – in stark contrast to the notoriously unstable classical mirror approach.

“Our calculations have also indicated that we will have an energy confinement time improvement of a factor of 100 over traditional magnetic mirror machines,” added Co-founder and Chairman Erik Oden. 

Read full article here: https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Computer-simulations-show-Swedish-fusion-initiative-could-have-global-impact