Integrated Communications in Support of ITER
ITER, the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (to be sited in Cadarache, France) will employ magnetic confinement techniques to study "burning plasma" physics. It will be the largest and most expensive scientific instrument ever built for fusion research and is the next major step toward proving the scientific viabilit y of controlled fusion as an energy source.Participants in the project include the US, European Union, Japan, Korea, China and Russia.(India is currently negotiating entry).US scientists are engaged with their international partners in defining requirements and approaches for distributed collaboration and remote participation on this experiment.The plan is to test these approaches on existing facilities, such as the Alcator experiment at MIT, where widely based collaborations are already in place.
A unique feature of fusion energy research is the requirement to access, analyze, visualize and assimilate scientific data in near-real-time, to support decision making during operation of experiments. (This contrasts with large experiment s in other fields, such as high-energy or nuclear physics which operate primarily in a batch mode.) Fusion experiments put a particular premium on near real-time interactions with data and among members of the team. Informal and ad hoc discussions are a critical element of the ongoing research. Enabling effective international collaboration on this scale will require the construction of a working environment that is equally productive for on-site and off-site personnel engaged in experimental operations.
We have found that the greatest challenges involve communication and engagement between remote and local researchers rather than specific technical problems. With the research team distributed geographically and communications more