1. IEEE NPSS Real Time Conference 2009
Real-Time Tokamak Application Utilizing On-line High Performance Computing
Aljosa Vrancic, Lothar Wenzel, Bryan Marker, Michael Cerna, Nanxiong Zhang, Dong Chen, Bin Wang
IEEE NPSS Real Time Conference 2009

2. Plasma Control in Tokamak
Grad-Shafranov equation
The solution is used to control the shape of plasma.
Control cycle time must be 1 ms or faster.

3. Implementation Principle Component Analysis-based method
Pre-calculate thousands of solutions off-line
PCA makes the connection between off-line calculations and real-time measurement
Require very fast linear algebra operation
Might predicate wrong solution in some cases
Spectral method
More accurate than PCA-based method
Also can be parallelized on multi-core computer

4. Benchmarks
18 slot PXI chassis
16 National Instruments PXI 6143 S Series cards with 16 bit ADC’s
128 channels sampled at 10 kHz
PCIe-PXI bridge, 110 MB/s
Dell PowerEdge 2950
2 quad-core Intel Xeon X GHz
The benchmarks were in the 0.2 ms range, which left enough room for several other parts of the algorithm to finish the entire control loop in 1 ms.