Reply To: Toshiba's "Micro Nuclear Reactor" – it's not fusion, but it's here now

[jamesr]

I’d love to help, but I think I’m in the same boat as Reece. My PhD is at the stage where I really need to be concentrating on that. Also I’ve volunteered before for other things and never delivered so I don’t want to let you down again, Eric.

However, having said that when the time comes I’m eager to make a contribution. My fluid plasma code is written in C with final analysis/plotting done mostly in matlab, but I have used java before.

Henning is correct in that the language skill is less important than the maths/stats regarding the numerical methods to extract information from the data, carrying through errors to give robust figures suitable for scientific interpretation and publication.

As for data storage models I assume you’re building something akin to the Integrated Data Access Management (IDAM) system used on MAST and JET.
http://www.efda-itm.eu/~coelho/efda/EFDA/ProtectedArea/protected_docs/ITMTFCUlhamMeeting/ITM IDAM2.ppt
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0920379607005595

It is basically a system whereby the data from each shot is fed automatically from all the diagnostics into a central SQL database. The raw datasets can be accessed via a simple set of APIs for C,Java,Matlab etc. Any analysis code then can, by including the relevant header, extract raw data for any shot, returning the analysed data to the database.

Other higher level codes can then take the processed data from many diagnostics and combine them to perform more complex analysis. The final stage being comparing analysed data from many shots to uncover trends, scaling etc.