Harnessing the Power That Fuels Stars for Infinite Clean Energy

Project snapshot

As the risks of climate change continue to grow and energy consumption rises rapidly, it’s crucial for industries to decarbonize. This calls for a green transformation of the power sector. Alternative energy sources including wind, solar, and hydro can’t reach the scale required to supply even half of global demand for zero-emission energy. Fusion, the process that powers the stars, could become the key to unlocking the safe and affordable high-density energy solution needed to address climate change, catalyze the global clean energy transition, and achieve widespread decarbonization.

Our client, a green energy tech innovator, is making headway in harnessing laser-based fusion technology to provide an abundant carbon-neutral power source that leaves no long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. The company seeks to commercialize fusion energy globally, catering to large power consumers from emission-intensive sectors such as manufacturing, chemical, and steel production.

Intellias contributed security and cloud expertise to facilitate the implementation of our client’s clean energy solution that will streamline bringing fusion from the lab to the grid, speeding up the timeline for commercial power production.

Business challenge

To bring the fusion concept to life, our client has been testing their idea with computer-based physics simulations rather than conducting costly and lengthy experiments at research facilities. Powered by advanced algorithms, the simulations allow for complex calculations, accurate data analysis, and efficient performance predictions, resulting in informed engineering design choices.

However, this approach required sophisticated IT infrastructure and lots of computing capacity to run large-scale simulations and process over 10 TB of data daily. Our client decided to move to AWS infrastructure, as it offered sufficient high-performance computing capabilities as well as the high availability, scalability, and flexibility the project needed. This migration entailed shifting the whole project ecosystem to the cloud, ensuring efficient cloud performance, and optimizing cloud costs.

In addition to successfully completing this migration, our client sought to develop from scratch a robust information security concept and strategy to enhance employees’ security awareness and promote a culture of cybersecurity within the organization.

As an AWS MAP advanced consulting partner, we helped our client accelerate their cloud migration journey while cutting infrastructure expenses. Our security team also provided guidance in building InfoSec control processes to bolster cybersecurity across the company.

Technology solution

Migration to the AWS cloud

Our team started the switch from Azure and on-premises hybrid infrastructure to AWS infrastructure by analyzing our client’s requirements for handling large-scale loads and optimizing performance and costs. We defined key project goals, selected necessary components, and prepared a migration roadmap for further steps.

Intellias relied on its Systems Migration service and DevOps best practices to develop a global system architecture and redesign and migrate existing solutions, leveraging the pay-as-you-go model provided by the AWS Well-Architected Framework. Our engineers implemented a resilient, scalable, and high-performance infrastructure capable of withstanding heavy loads for running research simulations and processing, storing, and analyzing the resulting data.

Cloud optimization

Our team optimized the cost and performance of our client’s large-scale cloud infrastructure by using a 20% discount and cost-efficient virtual machines (VMs) offered by AWS MAP. We consulted our client on choosing the right region for building their cloud infrastructure, which allowed them to use the unmatched computational power of the latest-gen VMs, trimming computational costs by 50% compared to building local infrastructure.

We selected VMs with the optimal price-to-performance ratio to meet the need for a balanced load on operational memory and cores, network performance, and parallel processing. As a result, the high speed of running simulations boosted overall simulation productivity, providing more time for data analysis. We also created a workspace with dedicated VMs to help the client’s team more effectively process and analyze data.

In addition, our engineers eliminated idle performance and enhanced efficiency by configuring shutdown behavior of on-demand VMs. We also optimized infrequently accessed data storage, reducing associated costs by 5 times.

Cybersecurity consulting

Our security team took on the task of building resilient information control processes to ensure data security on the perimeter, workstation, network, cloud, and internal system levels. We started from developing a full-fledged security approach that grew into a company-wide information security management strategy for our client’s entire organization.

In close cooperation with our client’s top management and the company’s departments, our experts defined the solution vision, developed a robust cybersecurity strategy, built a range of policies and standards around this strategy, and created all documentation necessary to guide the security implementation process.

While integrating new security policies into workflows, we defined ownership of processes and provided knowledge sharing support to the client’s internal teams that are now working according to the security frameworks we developed. Our team also implemented additional security measures, such as configuring Azure and Microsoft 365 settings, setting up networks and firewalls, and establishing change management and incident management.

Business and global outcome

We helped our client further their technological development by accelerating the product’s time to market, enabling secure, productive computations and optimized data analysis. Based on simulation data, our client will be able to more efficiently allocate resources for building a prototype of a laser-based nuclear fusion reactor, with the aim of going from a lab experiment to constructing a commercial clean fusion power plant.

Reproducing the processes at the center of the sun and efficiently converting fusion energy into electricity would give humanity access to a safe, reliable, and bountiful energy source free from planet-warming carbon emissions and long-lasting radioactive waste. Harnessing fusion could help reverse climate change, solve global power supply challenges through large-scale decarbonized energy production, and ensure sustainable standards of living for the world’s population.