ICL Research Profile

Center for Edge of Tokamak Optimization

Overview

ICL will participate in the Center for Edge of Tokamak Optimization (CETOP), a new SciDAC effort led by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. In addition to PPPL and UTK, the project brings together researchers from universities (Columbia, Utah State), national labs (Lawrence Livermore, Oak Ridge, Brookhaven, Argonne, National Renewable Energy Lab), and industry (Fiat Lux, General Atomics). CETOP aims to advance current understanding of transient edge-localized modes (ELMs) in burning plasmas. ELMs are a key risk factor in tokamak fusion reactors, and controlling them is vital to creating a tokamak capable of deployment in a practical fusion power plant. Harnessing the power of HPC, CETOP will create new high-fidelity-based ELM stability maps, and also perform stability analyses for some non-ELMing regimes. An AI/ML thrust will extrapolate from databases to guide ELM-free design optimization. ICL’s main contribution to CETOP will focus on improving GPU-capable preconditioning of solvers in the plasma physics codes and will make use of the Ginkgo library.