Abstract of ASCOT-10 Project

ASCOT is a Monte-Carlo guiding centre following code suited especially for following fast ions in a fixed plasma and magnetic background. The code has been extensively used to simulate many different machines, including but not limited to ITER, JET and ASDEX Upgrade.

Further development plans for ASCOT include changing the code from the global variable paradigm to local variable paradigm. This would open the possibility of using shared memory multi-threading, like openMP and openCL. Currently ASCOT is parallelised with the message passing interface (MPI).

From the algorithmic side, the magnetic field interpolation could be enhanced. Now the interpolation is done locally using a number of nearest points. This could possibly be enhanced by using a global spline evaluation. Another possible enhancement is to construct a divergence free interpolation method in toroidal geometry.