Enabling the future: Nuclear fusion on Elastic Fabric Adapter (SUS203)
Enabling the Future of Fusion Energy and the Role of Elastic Fabric Adapter
Overview of Nuclear Fusion and Energy Transition
The world is off track from the 1.5°C scenario, and we are at a critical moment in the climate change challenge.
However, there are various zero-emission electricity sources available, including wind, solar, energy storage, geothermal, and nuclear fission.
Nuclear fusion is different from nuclear fission, as it involves fusing lighter atomic nuclei into heavier ones, converting matter into energy, and providing the promise of abundant, emissions-free energy.
Nuclear fusion has four fundamental characteristics that make it a game-changer:
It is emissions-free, with no greenhouse gases, nitrogen oxides, or sulfur dioxides produced.
It has fuel abundance, as the fuel (deuterium and tritium) can be extracted from water and lithium.
It can provide baseload, continuous, non-intermittent energy production.
It has inherent safety, with no risk of a chain reaction and no long-lived radioactive waste.
Accelerating Nuclear Fusion Development with Cloud and AI
The progress in nuclear fusion development has been limited by empirical science, where the process of building, testing, and iterating takes years to decades.
AI offers new possibilities to accelerate this progress, and an independent report from the Clean Air Task Force identified two main pathways:
Empirical scaling through simulation, minimizing the need for physical prototypes.
Improving the iteration and development process.
AI is helping address five key challenges in nuclear fusion:
Material selection
Superconductor development
Inertial fusion energy
Tritium breeding
Advanced diagnostics and control
Leveraging AWS Resources for Nuclear Fusion Research
Real to Fusion, a magnetic fusion energy startup, is using AWS cloud computing resources to accelerate fusion development.
They are utilizing the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which enables fast and efficient communication between multiple processors in a cloud-based system, comparable to the interconnects in traditional supercomputers.
Real to Fusion's proof-of-concept demonstrated performance that was 10% better than a government-sponsored supercomputer, using their custom-built VPIC software stack with EFA-compatible MPI.
They have also run large-scale simulations on 1,200 cores connected via EFA, allowing them to rapidly iterate and improve their fusion experiment based on the simulation results.
Enabling the Future of Fusion Energy
The development of nuclear fusion and AI/computing technologies are symbiotic, where progress in one can drive progress in the other.
AWS provides the tools, resources, and capabilities required to run high-performance simulations and enable the future of fusion energy.
This is an opportunity for the computing and AI community to engage in addressing one of humanity's grand challenges - securing a sustainable energy future.
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