The Bergen Computational Physics Laboratory

The Bergen Computational Physics Laboratory (BCPL) operated an EU Research Infrastructure in Framework Program 5 (FP5), which provided Transnational Access to more than 100 researchers in the EU, using the SGI_CRAY and IBM Power 4 supercomputers of the University of Bergen. It was operated by Unifob, by the theoretical and computational physics staff of the Physics Department of the university and by the computational science staff of Unifob.

Parallel to the BCPL activity the university hosted also a Marie-Curie Training Site with large number of students from all over Europe, to support education at the level of doctoral studies. This training program used the same facilities, and the synergy of the research and educational activities were highly appreciated. Local newspaper articles have frequently reported about the activity of BCPL. [UhU-avis-2001-BCPL.pdf] [ph-16-00-2000.pdf]

The operation started with an EU FP5 grant on Jan. 1st, 2000, and have received three large EU grants amounting to 823 000 Euro. [BCPL-ari-TR-3.doc]

Starting from January 2000 BCPL has accepted and completed near to 70 research projects for EU scientists. BCPL has held yearly user meetings at ECT* in Trento Italy, another EU Research Infrastructure for Theoretical Physics. Here BCPL gave scientific reports about its activity and achievements. [Bcpl-Rep-02.pptx] [BCPL-Rep-Trento03.ppt] [Rep-d02.ppt]

Our projects were spreading over particle, high and low energy nuclear, atomic, plasma and molecular physics, and extending to related fields in astrophysics as well as abstract statistical physics problems. The last EU financed projects were completed in 2004. Most projects belong to BCPL’s core activity of reaction modeling in different areas of physics, but several applied physics projects were also hosted, e.g. on optimization of nuclear reactor core burning out cycles, nuclear waste management, or on marine gas turbines designed at Rolls-Royce in Hodvikneset near Bergen.

This was one of the first large scale EU projects at the University of Bergen at the time. Subsequently the EU financing was decreased, the financing for large scale EU physics and computational research was separated and EU Integrated Infrastructures were coordinated from other countries. Thus high energy theoretical and computational physics is now supported by the EU Hadron Physics projects (by 10-15 mill. Eur. grants), but the Bergen share of these projects are small compared to the previous BCPL activity.

The Scientific reports of BCPL: [Scientific_rep-2001.doc] [Scientific_rep-2002.doc] [Scientific_rep-2003.doc]

The final assessment of BCPL's activity was exceptionally positive from the EU's International Evaluation Panel: [Tech-Rev-Access-00094-00163-2003.pdf]