Tools for remote collaboration on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility

The DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak experiment funded by the US Department of Energy and operated by General Atomics (GA), is an internatio nal resource for plasma physics and fusion energy science research. This fa cility has a long history of collaborations with scientists from a wide var iety of laboratories and universities from around the world. That collabora tion has mostly been conducted by travel to and participation at the DIII-D site. Many new developments in the computing and technology fields are now facilitating collaboration from remote sites, thus reducing some of the ne eds to travel to the experiment. Some of these developments include higher speed wide area networks, powerful workstations connected within a distribu ted computing environment, network based audio/video capabilities, and the use of the world wide web. As the number of collaborators increases, the ne ed for remote tools become important options to efficiently utilize the DII I-D facility. In the last two years a joint study by GA, Princeton Plasma P hysics Laboratory (PPPL), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), an d Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has introduced remote collaboration tools into the DIII-D environment and studied their effectiveness. These to ols have included the use of audio/video for communication from the DIII-D control room, the broadcast of meetings, use of inter-process communication software to post events to the network during a tokamak shot, the creation of a DCE (distributed computing environment) cell for creating a common co llaboratory environment, distributed use of computer cycles, remote data ac cess, and remote display of results. This study also included sociological studies of how scientists in this environment work together as well as apar t. As a result of these studies, there is now in place an automated distrib uted processing environment connected to the real-time experimental operati ons which can be joined by users at remote locations. This environment will allow further exploration of the technology and sociology of remote partic ipation in the DIII-D program. Having the tools in place has already permit ted remote participation in DIII-D experiments that would not have occurred otherwise, and thus the introduction of these tools has shown the initial feasibility of increasing and improving remote collaboration. (C) 1999 Publ ished by Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.