Advances in Remote Participation for Fusion Experimental Facilities

Magnetic fusion experiments continue to grow in size and complexity resulting in a concurrent growth in collaborations between experimental sites and laboratories worldwide. Collaborative research within each group, combined with collaboration between groups is presenting new and unique challenges in the field of remote participation technology. These challenges are being addressed by the worldwide creation and deployment of advanced collaborative software and hardware tools. This paper reviews the work of the National Fusion Collaboratory Project, identifies areas of work required for the success of future-large-scale experiments, and argues that even though ITER´s first plasma is over a decade away the intervening time should be used for further development and testing of the technologies outlined in this paper