Toward a first-principles integrated simulation of tokamak edge plasmas

Performance of the ITER is anticipated to be highly sensitive to the edge plasma condition. The edge pedestal in ITER needs to be predicted from an integrated simulation of the necessary first-principles, multi-scale physics codes. The mission of the SciDAC Fusion Simulation Project (FSP) Prototype Center for Plasma Edge Simulation (CPES) is to deliver such a code integration framework by (1) building new kinetic codes XGC0 and XGC1, which can simulate the edge pedestal buildup; (2) using and improving the existing MHD codes ELITE, M3D-OMP, M3D-MPP and NIMROD, for study of large-scale edge instabilities called Edge Localized Modes (ELMs); and (3) integrating the codes into a framework using cutting-edge computer science technology. Collaborative effort among physics, computer science, and applied mathematics within CPES has created the first working version of the End-to-end Framework for Fusion Integrated Simulation (EFFIS), which can be used to study the pedestal-ELM cycles

TMaR: a two-stage MapReduce scheduler for heterogeneous environments

In the context of MapReduce task scheduling, many algorithms mainly focus on the scheduling of Reduce tasks with the assumption that scheduling of Map tasks is already done. However, in the cloud deployments of MapReduce, the input data is located on remote storage which indicates the importance of the scheduling of Map tasks as well. In this paper, we propose a two-stage Map and Reduce task scheduler for heterogeneous environments, called TMaR. TMaR schedules Map and Reduce tasks on the servers that minimize the task finish time in each stage, respectively. We employ a dynamic partition binder for Reduce tasks in the Reduce stage to lighten the shuffling traffic. Indeed, TMaR minimizes the makespan of a batch of tasks in heterogeneous environments while considering the network traffic. The simulation results demonstrate that TMaR outperforms Hadoop-stock and Hadoop-A in terms of makespan and network traffic and achieves by an average of 29%, 36%, and 14% performance using Wordcount, Sort, and Grep benchmarks. Besides, the power reduction of TMaR is up to 12%

Whole-volume integrated gyrokinetic simulation of plasma turbulence in realistic diverted-tokamak geometry

Performance prediction for ITER is based upon the ubiquitous experimental observation that the plasma energy confinement in the device core is strongly coupled to the edge confinement for an unknown reason. The coupling time-scale is much shorter than the plasma transport time-scale. In order to understand this critical observation, a multi-scale turbulence-neoclassical simulation of integrated edge-core plasma in a realistic diverted geometry is a necessity, but has been a formidable task. Thanks to the recent development in high performance computing, we have succeeded in the integrated multiscale gyrokinetic simulation of the ion-temperature-gradient driven turbulence in realistic diverted tokamak geometry for the first time. It is found that modification of the self-organized criticality in the core plasma by nonlocal core-edge coupling of ITG turbulence can be responsible for the core-edge confinement coupling. © 2009 IOP Publishing Lt