National Fusion Collaboratory Project Research Articles

The collaborative tokamak control room

Magnetic fusion experiments keep growing in size and complexity resulting in a concurrent growth in collaborations between experimental sites and laboratories worldwide. In the US, the National Fusion Collaboratory Project is developing a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for all aspects of magnetic fusion energy research by creating a robust, user-friendly collaborative environment and deploying this to the more than 1000 US fusion scientists in 40 institutions who perform magnetic fusion research. This paper reports on one aspect of the project which is the development of the collaborative tokamak control room to enhance both collocated and remote scientific participation in experimental operations. This work includes secured computational services that can be scheduled as required, the ability to rapidly compare experimental data with simulation results, a means to easily share individual results with the group by moving application windows to a shared display, and the ability for remote scientists to be fully engaged in experimental operations through shared audio, video, and applications. The project is funded by the USDOE Office of Science, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program and unites fusion and computer science researchers to directly address these challenges.

Security on the US fusion grid

The National Fusion Collaboratory project is developing and deploying new distributed computing and remote collaboration technologies with the goal of advancing magnetic fusion energy research. This has led to the development of the U.S. fusion grid (FusionGrid), a computational grid composed of collaborative, compute, and data resources from the three large U.S. fusion research facilities and with users both in the U.S. and in Europe. Critical to the development of FusionGrid was the creation and deployment of technologies to ensure security in a heterogeneous environment. These solutions to the problems of authentication, authorization, data transfer, and secure data storage, as well as the lessons learned during the development of these solutions, may be applied outside of FusionGrid and scale to future computing infrastructures such as those for next-generation devices like ITER.

Grid Support for Collaborative Control Room in Fusion Science

The National Fusion Collaboratory project seeks to enable fusion scientists to exploit Grid capabilities in support of experimental science. To this end we are exploring the concept of a collaborative control room that harnesses Grid and collaborative technologies to provide an environment in which remote experimental devices, codes, and expertise can interact in real time during an experiment. This concept has the potential to make fusion experiments more efficient by enabling researchers to perform more analysis and by engaging more expertise from a geographically distributed team of scientists and resources. As the realities of software development, talent distribution, and budgets increasingly encourage pooling resources and specialization, we see such environments as a necessary tool for future science. In this paper, we describe an experimental mock-up of a remote interaction with the DIII-D control room. The collaborative control room was demonstrated at SC03 and later reviewed at an international ITER Grid Workshop. We describe how the combined effect of various technologies--collaborative, visualization, and Grid--can be used effectively in experimental science. Specifically, we describe the Access Grid, experimental data presentation tools, and agreement-based resource management and workflow systems enabling time-bounded end-to-end application execution. We also report on FusionGrid services whose use during the fusion experimental cycle became possible for the first time thanks to this technology, and we discuss its potential use in future fusion experiments.

Grid computing and collaboration technology in support of fusion energy sciences

Science research in general and magnetic fusion research in particular continue to grow in size and complexity resulting in a concurrent growth in collaborations between experimental sites and laboratories worldwide. The simultaneous increase in wide area network speeds has made it practical to envision distributed working environments that are as productive as traditionally collocated work. In computing power, it has become reasonable to decouple production and consumption resulting in the ability to construct computing grids in a similar manner as the electrical power grid. Grid computing, the secure integration of computer systems over high speed networks to provide on-demand access to data analysis capabilities and related functions, is being deployed as an alternative to traditional resource sharing among institutions. For human interaction, advanced collaborative environments are being researched and deployed to have distributed group work that is as productive as traditional meetings. The DOE Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing Program initiative has sponsored several collaboratory projects, including the National Fusion Collaboratory Project, to utilize recent advances in grid computing and advanced collaborative environments to further research in several specific scientific domains. For fusion, the collaborative technology being deployed is being used in present day research and is also scalable to future research, in particular, to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor experiment that will require extensive collaboration capability worldwide. This paper briefly reviews the concepts of grid computing and advanced collaborative environments and gives specific examples of how these technologies are being used in fusion research today.

05/00113 Building the US National Fusion Grid: results from the National Fusion Collaboratory Project: Schissel, D. P. et al. Fusion Engineering and Design, 2004, 71, (1–4), 245–250

05/00113 Building the US National Fusion Grid: results from the National Fusion Collaboratory Project: Schissel, D. P. et al. Fusion Engineering and Design, 2004, 71, (1–4), 245–250

Advances in the real-time interpretation of fusion experiments

The National Fusion Collaboratory Project is developing a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for all aspects of magnetic fusion energy research by creating a robust, user-friendly collaborative environment and deploying this to the more than one thousand fusion scientists in forty institutions who perform magnetic fusion research in the US. Work specifically focusing on advancing real-time interpretation of fusion experiments includes collocated collaboration in tokamak control rooms via shared display walls, remote collaboration using Internet based audio and video, and pseudo-real-time data analysis via the National Fusion Energy Grid (FusionGrid). The technologies being developed and deployed will also scale to the next generation experimental devices such as ITER.

Building the US National Fusion Grid: results from the National Fusion Collaboratory Project

The US National Fusion Collaboratory Project is developing a persistent infrastructure to enable scientific collaboration for all aspects of magnetic fusion research. The project is creating a robust, user-friendly collaborative software environment and making it available to more than 1000 fusion scientists in 40 institutions who perform magnetic fusion research in the United States. In particular, the project is developing and deploying a national Fusion Energy Sciences Grid (FusionGrid) that is a system for secure sharing of computation, visualization, and data resources over the Internet. The FusionGrid goal is to allow scientists at remote sites to fully participate in experimental and computational activities as if they were working at a common site thereby creating a virtual organization of the US fusion community. The project is funded by the USDOE Office of Science, Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) Program and unites fusion and computer science researchers to directly address these challenges.

A general purpose data analysis monitoring system with case studies from the National Fusion Grid and the DIII–D MDSplus between pulse analysis system

Abstract As computing infrastructures become more complex, it is important to centralize information in order to efficiently monitor and maintain computing processes. A general monitoring system has been developed at the DIII–D National Fusion Facility, that combines code run status, data analysis tracking, logfile access, complex error detection, and expert system capabilities. The monitoring system’s flexibility and ease of deployment have enabled it to be successfully applied to two significantly different computing environments. At DIII–D, the system is being used as the data analysis monitor ( http://nssrv1.gat.com:8000/dam ) to allow both application scientists and computer scientists to monitor the status of between pulse MDSplus dispatched data analysis codes. The monitoring system is also being used by the National Fusion Collaboratory Project, as the Fusion Grid monitor ( http://nssrv1.gat.com:8000/fgm ), to track multiple asynchronous complex code runs on the Fusion Grid.