GPEC, a real-time capable Tokamak equilibrium code

TL;DR

GPEC is a novel parallelized, open-source tokamak equilibrium code capable of real-time flux distribution computation within 1 ms, enhancing plasma control for fusion experiments like AUG.

Contribution

It introduces a hybrid parallelization scheme and extends existing algorithms to achieve real-time performance on standard hardware.

Findings

Achieves 1 ms computation time for flux distributions

Supports up to 15 basis functions and 90 diagnostic signals

Enables real-time plasma control parameter derivation

Abstract

A new parallel equilibrium reconstruction code for tokamak plasmas is presented. GPEC allows to compute equilibrium flux distributions sufficiently accurate to derive parameters for plasma control within 1 ms of runtime which enables real-time applications at the ASDEX Upgrade experiment (AUG) and other machines with a control cycle of at least this size. The underlying algorithms are based on the well-established offline-analysis code CLISTE, following the classical concept of iteratively solving the Grad-Shafranov equation and feeding in diagnostic signals from the experiment. The new code adopts a hybrid parallelization scheme for computing the equilibrium flux distribution and extends the fast, shared-memory-parallel Poisson solver which we have described previously by a distributed computation of the individual Poisson problems corresponding to different basis functions. The code is based entirely on open-source software components and runs on standard server hardware and software environments. The real-time capability of GPEC is demonstrated by performing an offline-computation of a sequence of 1000 flux distributions which are taken from one second of operation of a typical AUG discharge and deriving the relevant control parameters with a time resolution of a millisecond. On current server hardware the new code allows employing a grid size of 32x64 zones for the spatial discretization and up to 15 basis functions. It takes into account about 90 diagnostic signals while using up to 4 equilibrium iterations and computing more than 20 plasma-control parameters, including the computationally expensive safety-factor q on at least 4 different levels of the normalized flux.