High-speed, multi-input, multi-output control using GPU processing in the HBT-EP tokamak

We report on the design of a new plasma control system for the HBT-EP tokamak that utilizes a graphical processing unit (GPU) to magnetically control the 3D perturbed equilibrium state [1] of the plasma. The control system achieves cycle times of 5 μs and I/O latencies below 10 μs for up to 96 inputs and 64 outputs. The number of state variables is in the same order. To handle the resulting computational complexity under the given time constraints, the control algorithms are designed for massively parallel processing. The necessary hardware resources are provided by an NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPU, offering a total of 448 computing cores running at 1.3 GHz each. A new control architecture allows control input from magnetic diagnostics to be pushed directly into GPU memory by a D-TACQ ACQ196 digitizer, and control output to be pulled directly from GPU memory by two D-TACQ AO32 analog output modules. By using peer-to-peer PCI express connections, this technique completely eliminates the use of host RAM and central processing unit (CPU) from the control cycle, permitting single-digit microsecond latencies on a standard Linux host system without any real-time extensions.