Education/LessonsLearned/LessonsLearned

Remote participation over the Internet has been successfully performed with several foreign universities in Hungary, Belgium, Costa Rica and with a summer school in Kudowa, Poland. Real experimental sessions have been performed online as well as offline with the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The Advanced operation mode was successfully tested with the Winter Plasma School in Marianska, Czech Republic.

Remote practices performed on GOLEM were overwhelmingly successful and popular among students. However, they have already taught some lessons and marked some directions for the development. The most important lesson was that for measurement experience, online measurements are very much preferred over offline measurements. The reason for this is quite clear: remote participants should really have the feeling of operating a device and take decisions based on their understanding of the previous results. In order to be able to schedule an online practice for students, reliable (and/or redundant) Internet connection has high priority. During the practices, it also became clear that in this rapidly changing phase of the GOLEM experiment supervision by a fusion scientist at the students’ site is clearly required to help with the interpretation. It was also concluded that programming help should be provided to students in processing raw data so that they can concentrate on online data processing and discussion of the results.

This demonstrated the ability to make a tokamak globally accessible and one way in which multiple participants can collaborate on a single tokamak, without the need for specialized software whilst maintaining security. Security also can be achieved using the standard HTTP/S proxy and firewall methods when using web based systems. Participants were presented with a live control panel which self refreshed, constantly informing people of the experiment status. The result of each plasma discharge was available on the system shortly after it took place.

Advanced mode with the help of X11 protocol showed satisfactory fast respond over the internet even with the connection speed slightly below the standard.

Training courses and experiments

References