IEFIT-an interactive approach to high temperature fusion plasma magnetic equilibrium fitting

An interactive IDL based wrapper, IEFIT, has been created for the magnetic equilibrium reconstruction code EFIT written in FORTRAN. It allows high temperature fusion physicists to rapidly optimize a plasma equilibrium reconstruction by eliminating the unnecessarily repeated initialization in the conventional approach along with the immediate display of the fitting results of each input variation. It uses a new IDL based graphics package, GaPlotObj, developed in cooperation with Fanning Software Consulting, that provides a unified interface with great flexibility in presenting and analyzing scientific data. The overall interactivity reduces the process to minutes from the usual hours