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The pro-algesic transient receptor potential ankyrin 1 (TRPA1) channel, expressed by a subpopulation of primary sensory neurons, has been implicated in various pain models in mice. However, evidence in rats indicates that TRPA1 conveys nociceptive signals elicited by channel activators, but not those associated with tissue inflammation or nerve injury. Here, in rats, we explored the TRPA1 role in mechanical allodynia associated with stimulation of peptidergic primary sensory neurons (neurogenic inflammation) and moderate (partial sciatic nerve ligation, pSNL) or severe (chronic constriction injury, CCI) sciatic nerve injury.Acute nociception and mechanical hypersensitivity associated with neurogenic inflammation and sciatic nerve injury (pSNL and CCI) were investigated in rats with TRPA1 pharmacological antagonism or genetic silencing. TRPA1 presence and function were analysed in cultured rat Schwann cells.Hind paw mechanical allodynia (HPMA), but not acute nociception, evoked by local injection of capsaicin or allyl isothiocyanate, the TRP vanilloid 1 (TRPV1) or the TRPA1 activators was mediated by CGRP released from peripheral sensory nerve terminals. CGRP-evoked HPMA was sustained by a ROS-dependent TRPA1 activation, probably in Schwann cells. HPMA evoked by pSNL, but not that evoked by CCI, was mediated by ROS and TRPA1 without the involvement of CGRP.As found in mice, TRPA1 mediates mechanical allodynia associated with neurogenic inflammation and moderate nerve injury in rats. The channel contribution to mechanical hypersensitivity is a common feature in rodents and might be explored in humans.

In the context of drug-receptor binding affinity calculations using molecular dynamics techniques, we implemented a combination of Hamiltonian replica exchange (HREM) and a novel nonequilibrium alchemical methodology, called virtual double-system single-box, with increased accuracy, precision, and efficiency with respect to the standard nonequilibrium approaches. The method has been applied for the determination of absolute binding free energies of 16 newly designed noncovalent ligands of the main protease (3CLpro) of SARS-CoV-2. The core structures of 3CLpro ligands were previously identified using a multimodal structure-based ligand design in combination with docking techniques. The calculated binding free energies for four additional ligands with known activity (either for SARS-CoV or SARS-CoV-2 main protease) are also reported. The nature of binding in the 3CLpro active site and the involved residues besides the CYS-HYS catalytic dyad have been thoroughly characterized by enhanced sampling simulations of the bound state. We have identified several noncongeneric compounds with predicted low micromolar activity for 3CLpro inhibition, which may constitute possible lead compounds for the development of antiviral agents in Covid-19 treatment.

The European industry sector is responsible for about one-third of the EU's total energy consumption and process-related Greenhouse Gas emissions, which makes it a central factor in the EU's climate and energy strategies. Energy cooperation, i.e., the mutualised generation, use and/or acquisition of energy by at least two companies, has the potential of significantly supporting the successful achievement of these strategies. This paper presents a concept for moving from a single-company sustainable energy intervention approach to cooperative sustainable energy solutions within the framework of industrial parks. Technical, economic, regulatory, organizational, and social barriers for energy-efficient park design and operation on all levels and instruments to overcome them have been systematically analysed, taking correlation of solutions, and park-specific requirements into account, thus providing a holistic workflow. First results show that technical and economic attractiveness, and an enabling legal and policy context, are not always enough. For promising energy cooperation solutions to flourish, cultural, organizational, social, and behavioural factors also play a significant role. Furthermore, findings show that external facilitators are helpful to pool efforts to achieve greater engagement.

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignancy worldwide with a prognosis less than 1 year in unresectable or metastatic disease. HER2 expression is the main biomarker to lead the addition of trastuzumab to first line systemic chemotherapy improving the overall survival in advanced HER2-positivegastric adenocarcinoma. The inevitable development of resistance to trastuzumab remains a great problem inasmuch several treatment strategies that have proven effective in breast cancer failed to show clinical benefit in advanced gastric cancer. In this review, we summarize the available data on the mechanisms underlying primary and secondary resistance toHER2-targeted therapy and current challenges in the treatment of HER2-positive advanced gastric cancer refractory to trastuzumab. Further, we describe the prognostic value of new non-invasive screening techniques, the current development of novel agents such us HER2 antibody-drug conjugates and bispecific antibodies, and the strategies with antitumor activity on going.

The injection of cryogenic pellets from the low field side (LFS) has long been in use for core fuelling of fusion devices, but injection from the high field side (HFS) has proved to provide a more effective core particle deposition, despite the severe limitations imposed to the pellet speed (≤300 m/s) by inboard accessibility. In the future, an alternative approach may be that of injecting high-speed pellets from the HFS, through suitable “free-flight” paths, eliminating curved transfer systems. Furthermore, the expected length of the plasma discharges will require steady-state repetitive systems. ORNL and ENEA have been collaborating on high-speed injectors since 1990; they successfully realized a high-speed repeating pellet injector (2.55 km/s at 1 Hz). Since then, good progress has been achieved on both fronts of steady-state extruders, and operation and reliability of two-stage guns. A comprehensive R&D program is therefore proposed to investigate how far speed limits and repetition rates of combined two-stage guns and steady-state extruders technologies can be extended. Simulations results are presented showing pellet penetration for several injection locations on a tokamak under construction such as JT60-SA, on the basis of one set of design plasma parameters.

EXTENDED ABSTRACT ENEA is the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development. ENEA operates in many sectors among which the most important are: energy technologies, materials physics, life sciences and climate. In the framework of its institutional mission, the ICT Division provides computing and storage resources integrated into ENEAGRID/CRESCO, an infrastructure distributed over 6 sites, whose main facilities are the HPC CRESCO clusters. The bulk of all storage is based on IBM Spectrum Scale (GPFS) since many years. The access to data, even over WAN, is managed by GPFS clusters. In May 2018 the new cluster CRSCO6 was inaugurated. CRSCO6, a 1.4 Pflops based on Intel Xeon X86-64 SkyLake CPU ranked at 420th of TOP 500 Nov.2018 list. While the interconnection of CRESCO6 is based on Intel Omni-Path (OPA) (100 Gbps), the previous CRESCO4 and CRESCO5 clusters have a network based on InfniBand QDR Truescale fabric (40 Gbps). Hence, in order to provides storage to all CRESCO clusters a GPFS multifabric layout has been implemented after dedicated tests. The work describes the ENEAGRID/CRESCO infrastructure and in particular the solution adopted to implement the GPFS multifabric.

The four-barrel, two-stage gun Ignitor Pellet Injector (IPI) was developed in collaboration between ENEA and ORNL. The prototype injector is presently located at Oak Ridge (TN, USA), and is normally operated locally through a control and data acquisition system developed in LabVIEW. More recently, a remote-control system has been set up, based on RealVNC®, which allows to operate the IPI from a control room in Italy. Tools for data transfer and storage into ENEA ICT area have also been provided. A Staging, Storage and Sharing system, named E3S, developed using OwnCloud as architectural component, is used for file synchronization and sharing of the data acquired by the diagnostic systems. It provides a homogeneous platform able to store and share heterogeneous data produced by many data acquisition systems in large nuclear fusion experiments. This paper reports about the implementation of the IPI remote control, and presents the application of E3S to this specific case, allowing easy storage and sharing of experimental data onto a wide-area distributed file-system, as well as remote data access via web-services based on MDS+ tool, integrated with MySQL metadata. A performance analysis of the architectural components is also introduced.

In system engineering context, a functional analysis is the systematic process of identifying, describing and correlating the functions a system must perform in order to be successful at any foreseen life-cycle phase or operational state/mode. By focusing on what the system must do disregarding the implementation, the functional analysis supports an unbiased system requirement allocation analysis. The system function architecture is defined in terms of process, protection (interlock) or nuclear safety functions. Then, the system functions are analyzed from several points of view in order to highlight the various pieces of information defining the way the system is designed to accomplish its mission as defined in the system requirement documents. The process functional flow is identified and represented by Functional Flow Block Diagrams (FFBD) while the system function interfaces are identified and represented by IDEFy diagrams. Function interfaces are defined as relationships across identified functions in terms of function input (from other functions or requirements), output (added value or outcome of the function), controls (from other functions or systems) and mechanisms necessary to fulfill the function. The function architecture is further detailed by considering for each function: a) the phase of application, b) the actions performed c) the controlled variable and control actions to be foreseen in the implementation of the functions, d) the system involved in the control action, e) the equipment involved in the function, f) the requirements allocated to the function. The methodology here presented are suggested for the designing of fusion facilities and reactors already from the first phases of the pre-conceptual design, as it is now for DEMO.

The new European HPC facility for Fusion is in operation since July 2016. It replaces, for European fusion researchers, the Helios supercomputer installed in Japan in the context of the Broader Approach agreement. The supercomputer is hosted at CINECA and it is a fraction of the MARCONI system. Thanks to a customized technical project done by ENEA, in a joint development agreement with CINECA, the European community of fusion modelling can exploit the latest available CPU technologies, following the CINECA HPC roadmap towards 50 PFlops planned for 2019. The MARCONI Fusion fraction is being delivered in two phases: the first one, 1 PFlops of CPU multi-core architecture based on the Intel Broadwell processors, is already in operation since July 2016, and the second one, 5 PFlops of the same architecture based on the INTEL Skylake processors, will be deployed in July 2017. Furthermore the project includes 1 PFlops of the third generation of Intel Xeon Phi many-core architecture (Knights Landing generation). Within this framework, ENEA/CINECA provides, in addition, the operation support of the Gateway infrastructure of EUROFusion Work-Package Code Development. A new Gateway HPC system is in operation at CINECA since Jan. 2017 thanks to the data migration and software porting activities carried out by ENEA/CINECA team together with the Core Programming Team of the Infrastructure and Support Activity work package from EUROfusion. The new Gateway infrastructure is tightly coupled with the MARCONI Fusion fraction, sharing the same 100 Gbps low-latency network based on the Intel OmniPath technology. The paper describes the technical details and the performances of MARCONI, one of the largest HPC OmniPath based infrastructure.

Integrated modeling (IM) of present experiments and future tokamak reactors requires the provision of computational resources and numerical tools capable of simulating multiscale spatial phenomena as well as fast transient events and relatively slow plasma evolution within a reasonably short computational time. Recent progress in the implementation of the new computational resources for fusion applications in Europe based on modern supercomputer technologies (supercomputer MARCONI-FUSION), in the optimization and speedup of the EU fusion-related first-principle codes, and in the development of a basis for physics codes/modules integration into a centrally maintained suite of IM tools achieved within the EUROfusion Consortium is presented. Physics phenomena that can now be reasonably modelled in various areas (core turbulence and magnetic reconnection, edge and scrape-off layer physics, radio-frequency heating and current drive, magnetohydrodynamic model, reflectometry simulations) following successful code optimizations and parallelization are briefly described. Development activities in support to IM are summarized. They include support to (1) the local deployment of the IM infrastructure and access to experimental data at various host sites, (2) the management of releases for sophisticated IM workflows involving a large number of components, and (3) the performance optimization of complex IM workflows. This work has been carried out within the framework of the EUROfusion Consortium and has received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2014 to 2018 under grant agreement 633053. The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the European Commission or ITER.

FTU is operating since 1989, thus its hardware and software infrastructure must be continuously updated to preserve its efficiency and reliability. This issue can be addressed by means of two distinct approaches: (i) the migration to an emulated environment enabling the use of modern hardware on virtualized standard servers to keep the operating systems full functionality and the application environment; (ii) the porting of the complete system architecture to new hardware, new operating systems, and new programming languages. This paper reports on the upgrades implemented on FTU in the last two years using both these approaches including the new system to acquire and store the image frames of FTU plasma discharges through a Photron FASTCAM SA4 camera. Regarding data handling, a small Linux high performance computing system (1TFlops) with a high performance data storage system (100 TB) in InfiniBand DDR infrastructure has been installed as data analysis, modelling and archive cluster for the next three years of FTU experimental activities. © 2014 EURATOM-ENEA.

A new ECRH launcher mainly aimed at experiments on MHD stabilization has been recently installed in FTU and integrated with a Real Time controller. The new plug-in antenna is capable of injecting two beams over wide angular ranges, ±40 in toroidal and ±15 < θ < 44 in poloidal direction with fast mirror speed. The power is delivered to the launcher with two additional transmission lines (TL) connected to the existing ECRH system with remotely controlled switches. After the optical alignment of the TLs, a campaign of tests on the steering antenna was made with the launcher ex- and in-vessel. A procedure to calibrate the absolute mirror angular position was developed and successfully used. First high power pulses were carried out on plasma target delivering 2 × 0.3 MW EC power for 200 ms. © 2013 CNR-IFP Instituto di Fisica Plasma.

High I/O flow rates, up to 10 GB/s, are required in large fusion Tokamak experiments like ITER where hundreds of nodes store simultaneously large amounts of data acquired during the plasma discharges. Typical network topologies such as linear arrays (systolic), rings, meshes (2-D arrays), tori (3-D arrays), trees, butterfly, hypercube in combination with high speed data transports like Infiniband or 10G-Ethernet, are the main areas in which the effort to overcome the so-called parallel I/O bottlenecks is most focused. The high I/O flow rates were modelled in an emulated testbed based on the parallel file systems such as Lustre and GPFS, commonly used in High Performance Computing. The test runs on High Performance Computing–For Fusion (8640 cores) and ENEA CRESCO (3392 cores) supercomputers. Message Passing Interface based applications were developed to emulate parallel I/O on Lustre and GPFS using data archival and access solutions like MDSPLUS and Universal Access Layer. These methods of data storage organization are widely diffused in nuclear fusion experiments and are being developed within the EFDA Integrated Tokamak Modelling – Task Force; the authors tried to evaluate their behaviour in a realistic emulation setup.

The neonatal mammal faces an array of sensory stimuli when diverse neuronal types have yet to form sensory maps. How these inputs interact with intrinsic neuronal activity to facilitate circuit assembly is not well understood. By using longitudinal calcium imaging in unanesthetized mouse pups, we show that layer I (LI) interneurons, delineated by co-expression of the 5HT3a serotonin receptor (5HT3aR) and reelin (Re), display spontaneous calcium transients with the highest degree of synchrony among cell types present in the superficial barrel cortex at postnatal day 6 (P6). 5HT3aR Re interneurons are activated by whisker stimulation during this period, and sensory deprivation induces decorrelation of their activity. Moreover, attenuation of thalamic inputs through knockdown of NMDA receptors (NMDARs) in these interneurons results in expansion of whisker responses, aberrant barrel map formation, and deficits in whisker-dependent behavior. These results indicate that recruitment of specific interneuron types during development is critical for adult somatosensory function. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

As in any other long-lasting experiment, new and standard activities on Frascati Tokamak Upgrade may require technological updates, especially on the control and data acquisition domain. The present paper will deal with a set of experiences arising from the necessity to replace ageing systems that turned out to be an interesting test-bed for new technologies. The first case study deals with FTU slow control, which is based on a standard three-layer model. The lower layer has been updated in the G1 power supply of the toroidal field, replacing the old Westinghouse PLC with a Siemens-S7. To integrate the new PLC in FTU control system, the open source LibNodave package under Linux operating system has been used. The results are compared to those obtained using the Siemens-S7 commercial library. The second case study regards FTU magnetic measurements. The system proposed will lead to the replacement of the old CAMAC system with a PXI embedded controller, acquiring hundreds of signals. Finally it will be shown how, taking advantage of those technologies, an ITER relevant control and data acquisition architecture can be designed.

The EFDA task force on Integrated Tokamak Modelling (ITM-TF) is providing the EU fusion community with a complete and flexible suite of reliable software tools and codes able to simulate the next ITER and DEMO plasma discharges. EFDA has launched the Gateway project as the first computing facility to be jointly used by EU fusion associations. The Gateway has been designed to allow the ITM-TF members to work together on a common platform and share their codes, developments tools and technologies as well as to make able the inter-operation with tera-scale supercomputer facilities. Technically the Gateway is a rather small high computing facility in operation since 2008, with 1 Teraflops of theoretical peak and 100 Terabytes shared storage area for experimental and simulation data. This paper describes the information technologies involved in the Gateway facility, particularly as regards the low latency interconnect network for multi-core platform as well as fast I/O solutions implemented with storage over Infiniband and high performance parallel file systems. The solutions adopted on the Gateway facility had undergone to specific benchmarks showing excellent performances in typical fusion data handling issues. Finally the interoperability between Gateway and ENEA CRESÇO supercomputer will be described showing the access solutions that allow the exploitation of tera-scale supercomputer facilities.

In the context of the Integrated Tokamak Modelling Task Force, a large number of software projects are made available to the task force members, including developers and end-users. This has been achieved through a combination of tools and technologies. The front-end is represented by a Java based portal system exposing a PHP project management system, GForge. These two applications are linked by a single sign-on mechanism, Shibboleth [1], and through secure HTTP [2] request rewriting, where appropriate. Furthermore, the underlying storage facility is an OpenAFS [3] distributed file system and the user base comes from both a network information server and an LDAP [4] directory. Security mechanisms are those of a distributed system, with multiple access points and protocols used for reading and writing data. The present paper presents the challenges of integrating these different technologies and programming languages into a single, working, application presented to its users as a web portal. Chaining of the tools is explored through the user perspective, with an in-depth overview of the background transitions between the various systems involved with regard to security requirements for the front-end nodes and the policies as seen by the users.

To improve the collaboration between scientific communities working within geographically distributed laboratories, it is increasingly necessary to take into account the complexity of data streaming process and the difficulties with integrating heterogeneous instruments of different groups of researchers (Mongelli et al., 2017). This paper shows the 'ENEA staging storage sharing' (E3S) architecture developed within the COBRA project (http://cobra.enea.it/english) which promotes the technology transfer to small and medium-sized companies for the conservation of cultural heritage. This architecture was setup for the shaking tables at the Sustainable Innovation Technologies (SITEC) ENEA Casaccia R.C. Laboratory and it was used during experimental tests on two masonry walls made up of stone and tuff blocks that represent the poor Italian masonry of historical buildings, to verify the behaviour of innovative techniques of anti-seismic reinforcement. E3S supports the whole experimental process, from photogrammetric reconstruction to FEM calibration, reducing time needed to obtain experimental results by means real time data streaming functions.

In this paper we focus on the instabilities caused by the nonlinear behavior of the F coil current amplifier at FTU. This behavior induces closed-loop instability of the horizontal position stabilizing loop whenever the requested current is below the circulating current level. In the paper we first illustrate a modeling phase where nonlinear dynamics are derived and identified to reproduce the open-loop responses measured by the F coil current amplifier. The derived model is shown to successfully reproduce the experimental behavior by direct comparison with experimental data. Based on this dynamic model, we then reproduce the closed-loop scenario of the experiment and show that the proposed nonlinear model successfully reproduces the nonlinear instabilities experienced in the experimental sessions. Given the simulation setup, we next propose a nonlinear control solution to this instability problem. The proposed solution is shown to recover stability in closed-loop simulations. Experimental tests are scheduled for the next experimental campaign after the FTU restart.

This paper reports on the experimental results arising from the implementation of extremum seeking techniques to maximize in real time the radio-frequency (RF) power coupled to the plasma in the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) experimental facility. The RF under consideration is the Lower Hybrid (LH) and the coupling issue consists in the match between an antenna structure (an array of waveguides, the grill) and a load, i.e. the plasma. The optimization of the coupling level reduces the reflected power thus maximizing the RF effects on the plasma and at the same time avoiding temporary power shutdown to protect the system from the excess of reflection. Since it is unviable to inject a dither signal in the plasma control system, the implemented extremum seeking relies on existing disturbances in the experimental system, thus following a somewhat novel paradigm. First, simulation results are given based on a model of the closed-loop and then the experimental tests which confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach are shown.

The next nuclear fusion experiment, ITER, is providing the infrastructure for the optimal operation of a burning plasma, requiring feedback control of discharge parameters and on-line evaluation of computationally intensive models running in a cluster of controller nodes. Thus, the synchronization of the available information on the plasma and plant state variables among the controller nodes is a key issue for ITER. The ITER conceptual design aims to perform feedback control on a cluster of distributed controllers connected by a Synchronous Databus Network (SDN). Therefore it is mandatory to achieve a deterministic data exchange among the controller nodes with a refresh rate of at least 1 kHz and a jitter of at least 50 μs. Thus, a conservative estimate of the data flow within the controller network can be 3 kSample/ms. In this paper the open source RTnet project is evaluated to meet the requirements of the SDN of ITER. A testbed involving a cluster of eight nodes connected over a standard ethernet network has been set up to simulate a distributed real-time control system. The main goal of the test is to verify the compliance of the performance with the ITER SDN requirements.

The Infrastructure and Software Integration Project must provide the hardware and software environment for the European integrated tokamak modelling taskforce to build and simulate a comprehensive fusion device. Several frameworks have been evaluated in 2006 and this paper reports on the current status of the gateway, the data communication system, the Web portal and the various ITM applications. The first version will be delivered in 2007, prefiguring the next decades' tools.

In this paper we report on recent developments, based on The MathWorks’ Simulink and Real-Time Workshop (RTW) packages, aimed at obtaining a high level environment where a new control law can be easily modelled, simulated with the real-time constraints and then translated in the appropriate executable format. Using this tool, the control designer only needs to specify the control law in the Simulink graphical environment. The arising model is then automatically translated in C code, integrated with control system code and simulated in real-time using the data from the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) data base archive. All the necessary steps to adapt the RTW scripts and the control system code to the new simulation/validation environment will be illustrated in this paper. Moreover, we will report on some experimental tests where the actual experiment is compared with the simulations provided by the proposed environment. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper, we will report on the experimental results arising from the implementation of optimization techniques to maximize the RF power coupling versus the plasma conditions in the FTU experimental facility. These experiments are carried out by employing the open-source Linux-RTAI control system currently running on the FTU digital feedback loop. The RF power source under consideration is a lower hybrid system (LH) based on six gyrotrons with a nominal power output capability of 1.1 MW each. The optimization of the coupling level between the plasma and the emitting antenna reduces the reflected power, thus maximizing the heating effects in addition to avoiding danger to the emitter (equivalently, annoying safety shutdowns of the system). To this aim, the plasma displacement is modified by suitably adjusting the reference input to the stabilizing feedback, according to a steepest descent algorithm. It will be shown in the paper how this algorithm achieves a satisfactory level of robustness with respect to measurement errors and well performs both in simulation and in experimental tests, thus leading to an improved effectiveness of the RF heating system.

The Feedback Control System running at FTU has been recently ported from a commercial platform (based on LynxOS) to an open-source GNU/Linux-based RTAI-LXRT platform, thereby, obtaining significant performance and cost improvements. Based on the new open-source platform, it is now possible to experiment novel control strategies aimed at improving the robustness and accuracy of the feedback control. Nevertheless, the implementation of control ideas still requires a great deal of coding of the control algorithms that, if carried out manually, may be prone to coding errors, therefore time consuming both in the development phase and in the subsequent validation tests consisting of dedicated experiments carried out on FTU. In this paper, we report on recent developments based on Mathworks’ Simulink and Real Time Workshop (RTW) packages to obtain a user-friendly environment where the real time code implementing novel control algorithms can be easily generated, tested and validated. Thanks to this new tool, the control designer only needs to specify the block diagram of the control task (namely, a high level and functional description of the new algorithm under consideration) and the corresponding real time code generation and testing is completely automated without any need of dedicated experiments. In the paper, the necessary work carried out to adapt the Real Time Workshop to our RTAI-LXRT context will be illustrated. A necessary re-organization of the previous real time software, aimed at incorporating the code coming from the adapted RTW, will also be discussed. Moreover, we will report on a performance comparison between the code obtained using the automated RTW-based procedure and the hand-written C code, appropriately optimised; at the moment, a preliminary performance comparison consisting of dummy algorithms has shown that the code automatically generated from RTW is faster (about 30% up) than the manually written one. This preliminary result combined with the fact that the use of RTW eliminates the coding workload leads to the conclusion that this approach to control implementation grants significant advantages. According to the FTU experiment program, the actual deployment of the new tool is scheduled for the next experimental campaign.

Proof of principle of feed-back controlled Electron Cyclotron Heating and Current Drive (ECH/ECCD), aiming at automatic limitation (or suppression) of Neoclassical Tearing Modes amplitude, has been achieved in a number of present machines. In addition to Neoclassical Tearing Mode stabilization, more applications of well-localized ECH/ECCD can be envisaged (saw-tooth crash control, current profile control, thermal barrier control, disruption mitigation). However, in order to be able to take a step forward towards the application of these techniques to burning plasmas, some crucial issues should be more deeply analyzed: multi-beam simultaneous action, control of deposition radii rdep, diagnostic of plasma reaction. So far the Electron Cyclotron Emission has been the most important tool to get localized information on plasma response, essential for both rdep and risland recognition, but its use in very hot burning plasmas within automatic control loops should be carefully verified. Assuming that plasma response is appropriately diagnosed, the next matter to be discussed concerns how to control rdep, since all techniques so far used, or proposed (plasma position, toroidal field, mechanical beam steering, gyrotron frequency tuning) have limitations or drawbacks. Finally, simultaneous multiple actions on many actuators (EC beams), concurring to automatic control of one single parameter (e.g. NTM amplitude) might be a challenging task for the controller, particularly in view of the fact that any effect of each beam becomes visible only when it is positioned very close to the right radius. All these interlinked aspects are discussed in the paper.

Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) data management system underwent several developments in the last year, mainly due to the availability of huge amount of open source software and cheap commodity hardware. First of all, we replaced the old and expensive four SUN/SOLARIS servers running AFS (Andrew File System) fusione.it cell with three SuperServer Supermicro SC-742. Secondly Linux 2.4 OS has been installed on our new cell servers and OpenAFS 1.2.8 open source distributed file system has replaced the commercial IBM/Transarc AFS. A pioneering solution—SGI’s XFS file system for Linux—has been adopted to format one terabyte of FTU storage system on which the AFS volumes are based. Benchmark tests have shown the good performances of XFS compared to the classical ext3 Linux file system. Third, the data access software has been ported to Linux, together with the interfaces to Matlab and IDL, as well as the locally developed data display utility, SHOX. Finally a new Object-Oriented Data Model (OODM) has been developed for FTU shots data to build and maintain a FTU data warehouse (DW). FTU OODM has been developed using ROOT, an object oriented data analysis framework well-known in high energy physics. Since large volumes of data are involved, a parallel data extraction process, developed in the ROOT framework, has been implemented taking advantage of the AFS distributed environment of FTU computing system.