Wednesday 23th January at 11 am, the Millevoci broadcast at RSI was dedicated to the presentation of the computational activities at the Swiss Center for Scientific Computing (CSCS), bringing as an example the collaboration with the IRSOL in the field of solar physics numerical simulations.
Research at IRSOL currently is based on 3 pillars: telescope observations, theory and numerical simulations. The latter have been able to benefit in these last years of machine time at the powerful computer Piz Daint of the CSCS. In the computational field, projects were also started in collaboration with the Institute of Computational Sciences (ICS) at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), with the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) and with the Kiepenheuer Institut für Sonnenphysik (KIS) in Freiburg. International collaborations have grown in importance and this year culminated with the launch of a European H2020 project called Solarnet, carried out by a European consortium which includes IRSOL, CSCS and ICS through the USI. The main purpose of Solarnet is to make available to the scientific community, the major European infrastructures and to foster their collaboration and exchange of expertise in view of the projected construction of the European Solar Telescope (EST) on the Canary Islands. Among the main activities that will take place in Ticino in the context of Solarnet we mention: computation time made available to the European scientific community at the CSCS; the implementation at IRSOL of an innovative technique for the absolute polarization measurement and the organization of a summer school in collaboration with the ICS dedicated to computational techniques in solar physics.