Application of virtual machine technology to real-time mapping of Thomson scattering data to flux coordinates for the LHD

This paper presents a system called “TSMAP” that maps electron temperature profiles to flux coordinates for the Large Helical Device (LHD). Considering the flux surface is isothermal, TSMAP searches an equilibrium database for the LHD equilibrium that fits the electron temperature profile. The equilibrium database is built through many VMEC computations of the helical equilibria. Because the number of equilibria is large, the most important technical issue for realizing the TSMAP system is computational performance. Therefore, we use multiple personal computers to enhance performance when building the database for TSMAP. We use virtual machines on multiple Linux computers to run the TSMAP program. Virtual machine technology is flexible, allowing the number of computers to be easily increased. This paper discusses how the use of virtual machine technology enhances the performance of TSMAP calculations when multiple CPU cores are used.