arXiv subjects

N. Carey

Publications and source records attributed to N. Carey.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Neural operator surrogate models of plasma edge simulations: feasibility and data efficiency

The inclusion of high-fidelity simulations of SOL turbulence and transient MHD events such as ELMs in highly iterative applications remains computationally prohibitive, limiting their use in design and control workflows. Understanding these phenomena is vital, as they govern heat flux on plasma-facing components, influencing reactor performance and material lifetime. This study explored FNOs as surrogate models to accelerate plasma simulations from the JOREK MHD and STORM turbulence codes. FNOs were trained on single-step rollouts and evaluated in terms of long-term predictive accuracy in an auto-regressive manner. To mitigate the computational burden of dataset generation, a transfer learning strategy was explored, leveraging low-fidelity simulations to improve performance on high-fidelity datasets. These results showed that FNOs effectively captured initial plasma evolution, including blob movement and density source localization. However, long rollouts accumulated errors and exhibited sensitivity to certain physical phenomena, leading to non-monotonic error spikes. Transfer learning significantly reduced errors for small dataset sizes and short rollouts, achieving an order-of-magnitude reduction when transfering from low- to high-fidelity datasets. However, its effectiveness diminished with longer rollouts and larger dataset sizes, especially when applied to datasets with significantly different dynamics. Attempts to transfer models to previously unseen variables in simulations were unsuccessful, underscoring the limitations in this context. These findings demonstrate the promise of NOs for accelerating fusion-relevant PDE simulations. However, they also highlight key challenges: improving long-term accuracy to mitigate error accumulation, capturing critical physical behaviors, and developing robust surrogates that effectively leverage multi-fidelity, multi-physics datasets.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Neural-Parareal: Dynamically Training Neural Operators as Coarse Solvers for Time-Parallelisation of Fusion MHD Simulations

The fusion research facility ITER is currently being assembled to demonstrate that fusion can be used for industrial energy production, while several other programmes across the world are also moving forward, such as EU-DEMO, CFETR, SPARC and STEP. The high engineering complexity of a tokamak makes it an extremely challenging device to optimise, and test-based optimisation would be too slow and too costly. Instead, digital design and optimisation must be favored, which requires strongly-coupled suites of High-Performance Computing calculations. In this context, having surrogate models to provide quick estimates with uncertainty quantification is essential to explore and optimise new design options. Furthermore, these surrogates can in turn be used to accelerate simulations in the first place. This is the case of Parareal, a time-parallelisation method that can speed-up large HPC simulations, where the coarse-solver can be replaced by a surrogate. A novel framework, Neural-Parareal, is developed to integrate the training of neural operators dynamically as more data becomes available. For a given input-parameter domain, as more simulations are being run with Parareal, the large amount of data generated by the algorithm is used to train new surrogate models to be used as coarse-solvers for future Parareal simulations, leading to progressively more accurate coarse-solvers, and thus higher speed-up. It is found that such neural network surrogates can be much more effective than traditional coarse-solver in providing a speed-up with Parareal. This study is a demonstration of the convergence of HPC and AI which simply has to become common practice in the world of digital engineering design.

physics.plasm-ph↗

arXiv2024

Data efficiency and long term prediction capabilities for neural operator surrogate models of core and edge plasma codes

Simulation-based plasma scenario development, optimization and control are crucial elements towards the successful deployment of next-generation experimental tokamaks and Fusion power plants. Current simulation codes require extremely intensive use of HPC resources that make them unsuitable for iterative or real time applications. Neural network based surrogate models of expensive simulators have been proposed to speed up such costly workflows. Current efforts in this direction in the Fusion community are mostly limited to point estimates of quantities of interest or simple 1D PDE models, with a few notable exceptions. While the AI literature on methods for neural PDE surrogate models is rich, performance benchmarks for Fusion-relevant 2D fields has so far remained flimited. In this work neural PDE surrogates are trained for the JOREK MHD code and the STORM scrape-off layer code using the PDEArena library (https://github.com/microsoft/pdearena). The performance of these surrogate models is investigated as a function of training set size as well as for long-term predictions. The performance of surrogate models that are trained on either one variable or multiple variables at once is also considered. It is found that surrogates that are trained on more data perform best for both long- and short-term predictions. Additionally, surrogate models trained on multiple variables achieve higher accuracy and more stable performance. Downsampling the training set in time may provide stability in the long term at the expense of the short term predictive capability, but visual inspection of the resulting fields suggests that multiple metrics should be used to evaluate performance.

physics.plasm-ph↗