Alumni Project

The National Fusion Collaboratory

The National Fusion Collaboratory will advance scientific understanding and innovation in magnetic fusion research by enabling more efficient use of existing experimental facilities and more effective integration of experiment, theory, and modeling. Specifically, this project will create and deploy collaborative software tools throughout the national magnetic fusion research community comprised of over one thousand researchers from over forty institutions. Built on a foundation of established computer science toolkits, successful deployment of the Collaboratory will nevertheless require significant computer science research to extend the toolkits beyond their present capabilities. The National Fusion Collaboratory will enable networked real-time data analysis and instantaneous communication amongst geographically dispersed teams of experimentalists and theoreticians. This represents a fundamental paradigm shift for the fusion community where data, analysis and simulation codes, and visualization tools will be thought of as network services. In this new paradigm, access to resources (data, codes, visualization tools) is separated from their implementation, freeing the researcher from needing to know about software implementation details and allowing a sharper focus on the physics.