Software

The FAIR Data Pipeline (FDP) is a collection of software utilities for tracking the provenance of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data. It was originally developed to aid in the creation of reproducible epidemiological modelling workflows, a need spurred by the outbreak of COVID-19. FDP allows users to automate a data processing pipeline that traces all inputs, outputs and associated metadata in a FAIR manner. APIs are available in Python, R, Julia, C++, and Java.

EPOCH is a particle-in-cell (PIC) code used to simulate laser-plasma interactions, with research applications including inertial confinement fusion, laser wakefield acceleration, and quantum electrodynamics. However, EPOCH is written in Fortran, which will make it difficult to optimise for next-generation HPC architectures which will rely heavily on GPU offloading. As a result, there is an effort underway to reimplement EPOCH in C++ using performance-portable frameworks.

Epoch is a particle-in-cell (PIC) code widely used within plasma physics, particularly in the regime of laser-plasma interactions. PIC codes aim to self-consistently solve Maxwell’s equations in the presence of a large number of charged particles, many of which travel at relativistic velocities. Epoch and similar codes are often used to provide insight into the physics of matter interacting with extremely intense radiation, such as the conditions observed in inertial-confinement fusion (ICF) experiments or many astrophysical phenomena.

The Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak Upgrade (MAST-U) project generates a lot of data. After each ‘shot’, the raw data from sensors within the tokamak is made available to researchers via the Universal Data Access (UDA) system, with each signal represented by a three letter code. For example, ‘RCC’ is the signal for Celeste-3, which measures emission spectra from impurities in the plasma. MAST-U data is processed further using a scheduler system that automatically processes raw data into more useful diagnostics once those signals become available. This processed data is itself made available via UDA as a three letter signal code, and this may, in turn, be used to generate higher level diagnostics via the scheduler.

FreeQDSK is a Python library for reading/writing EQDSK files. These file formats are widely used within tokamak plasma research, but each code that uses them tends to include it’s own reader/writer functionality, and the availability of reliable open-source documentation is lacking. We hope that FreeQDSK can provide an easier way for plasma scientists to use these files in their own work.