A GÉANT on the fusion data highway

Since the ninth of April, GÉANT, the world's leading high-speed research and education network managed and operated by DANTE in Cambridge, UK, has been providing data links to the International Fusion Energy Research Centre (IFERC) in Rokkasho, Japan.

 

IFERC hosts the Helios supercomputer, a system with a compute power exceeding 1 PFlops attached to a storage capacity of 50 PB. The Helios supercomputer is provided and operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and is a European Domestic Agency resource.

 

GÉANT is supplying a 10 Gbps (10 Gigabits per second) link to connect Helios with scientists involved in ITER and DEMO, the demonstration fusion reactor considered as the follow-up to ITER.

 

It is hoped that, after the first fusion plasmas of ITER planned for 2020 and beyond, DEMO, an industrial demonstration fusion reactor, will lead to full-scale fusion energy reaching the commercial market in the second half of this century.