Parallel computing in soft X‐rays plasma diagnostic systems for thermal fusion reactors—feasibility studies for GPUs

This paper presents feasibility studies in utilizing graphics processing units (GPUs) as high-performance computing hardware with front-end electronics in high-scale magnetic confinement thermal fusion experiments. The objective of the research is to provide scalable, high-throughput, and low-latency measurements for the runtime tokamak metallic impurities X-ray diagnostic for the Tungsten Environment in Steady-State Tokamak (WEST) reactor. The heterogeneous system of front-end with field-programmable gate arrays and the back-end server was introduced to decompose workloads efficiently. It allows the comprehensive evaluation of CPUs and accelerators. In particular, a novel implementation of the back-end algorithm for GPU with the performance analysis are presented.