The Remote Experimentation Centre¹, a duplicate of ITER's control room on site, will enable scientists in Japan to remotely participate in ITER experiments. By storing the experimental data that will accumulate over time, it will make a massive database instantly accessible to researchers.
Each of ITER's early, non-nuclear plasmas will generate an estimated 1 terabyte of experimental data—the equivalent of a full commercial hard disk. When ITER goes nuclear, some ten years after entering operation, this volume might be multiplied by fifty.
The capacity to transfer this data to Japan at a pace compatible with that of the tokamak's experiments—approximately one pulse every 30 to 60 minutes—was demonstrated in early September by information technology specialists from ITER and their counterparts at three Japanese institutes: the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology (QST), the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS) and the National Institute of Informatics (NII), in cooperation with the European agency for ITER. The detailed results will be presented at the 26th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference (
FEC) in Kyoto this week.
From 30 August to 5 September, 50 terabytes/day were transferred from ITER to Rokkasho, Japan at an average speed of 7.9 gigabits per second—some 1,600 times faster than the average global broadband connexion. The operation, the largest ever inter-continental high speed data transfer, marked a major advance in state-of-the-art information science and technology.