The JET fusion experiment tokamak at Culham, Oxfordshire.
 
 

BCS Oxfordshire branch talk January 24th 2008 by Sverker Griph

Background and History

• Fusion for energy - a short introduction.
• A short introduction to the JET project and the JET plant.
• Mission critical IT - control, monitoring, data acquisition, data processing, engineering, management and remote collaboration.

Special IT Challenges at JET

• Project longevity - 30 years +
• High complexity
• High rate of change
• High availability
• Very high power and stored energy - risk for substantial damage
• High voltage isolation of fast analog signals
• Micro second synchronisation of thousands of modules in a large plant
• Real time IT:
• fast feed back loops with complex calculations
• typically 2 ms iteration time
• Large and growing experimental data volumes - all on-line
• 4 experiments per hour in 2 shift operation
• Every experiment typically need more than 20000 parameters to be configured
• Preliminary number crunching of results between experiments
• Remote collaborations across Europe and beyond - remote leadership of experiments

These challenges are for example addressed by

• selective adoption of and longterm ownership of IT standards,
• extensive use of data driven design,
• a pervasive use of IT engineering databases and
• an in-house high performance software component architecture.

The talk will also briefly cover how IT at JET is likely to influence IT at ITER, the next global fusion research project.

Tool: This web page was developed in the KIX collaboration framework using the Wiki2Html plugin for content management.

KIX - the federated collaboration and knowledge integration tool.