Current status of EU activities for the Remote Data Access System of the ITER Remote Experimentation Centre

The Broader Approach (BA) is an agreement between the European Union and Japan that complements the ITER Project. The ITER Remote Experimentation Centre (REC) in Rokkasho is one of the projects currently implemented within the BA agreement. The ultimate objective of the REC is to allow researchers to take part in the experimentation on ITER from a remote location. Before ITER will be operated, the REC will test ITER-relevant technologies for remote participation on JT-60SA, which is under construction in Naka, and possibly on existing EU tokamaks. In the current plan, the overall scope of the REC activities includes the provision of software tools for Remote Data Access (RDA). However, an RDA system for ITER will require a number of features that cannot be found in any of the existing machines. In particular, the following aspects are subjects of R&D in the field: o long pulse support; remote users will require the access to ITER data while the experiment is still ongoing; o data transfer optimization over high latency networks; this will be required for the REC, given the properties of network link between EU and Japan; o data transfer optimization for data visualization tools; when RDA technologies are used by data visualization tools, specific optimization can be performed. Currently two different technologies are under evaluation for the RDA system of the REC: MDSplus and IDAM. This paper first gives a brief overview of the current status of the REC project. Afterwards, the two considered tools will be introduced. Some preliminary results about data transfer performance with different communication protocols, such as TCP/IP and UDT, will be also presented. The two considered RDA tools have been also used to make a preliminary assessment for the transfer of large data sets. A proposal for the RDA system of the REC will be then discussed.