The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the United States Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have joined forces to link their advanced fusion supercomputing platforms, using artificial intelligence to accelerate fusion energy’s development.
At the Global Fusion Policy Summit held in London today, UKAEA and PPPL, the UK’s and one of the US’s leading national fusion laboratories, signed a Joint Declaration of Intent to explore linking UKAEA’s SUNRISE mission-focused AI supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform through a partnership known as the SUNRISE–STELLAR-AI Federation, News Cover reports, citing the UK government's official website.
The Global Fusion Policy Summit aims to increase regulatory harmonisation, crucial to achieve safe and secure fusion energy, and create certainty for developers and investors.
The federation would connect UKAEA’s SUNRISE fusion-focused supercomputer with PPPL’s STELLAR-AI platform, enabling researchers on both sides of the Atlantic to train AI models on results from both national laboratories and develop AI tools for future fusion power plants.
The collaboration would draw on experiments completed using UKAEA’s MAST Upgrade facility in Oxfordshire and PPPL’s NSTX-U facility in New Jersey.
The federation will mean both advanced computers will be used to train the same AI models, which need large volumes of high-quality data to make accurate predictions.
By combining supercomputing power and expertise, the federation aims to shorten the design cycle for future fusion power plants, make better use of existing experiments, and give the next generation of fusion scientists on both sides of the Atlantic a shared platform to build on.
