Remote participation infrastructure in the European fusion laboratories

The large experiments in the European fusion community are increasingly run as shared facilities. This is following the lead of the Joint European Torus (JET) Facilities that have been run in this way since the beginning of 2000 under the European Fusion Development Agreement (EFDA). The remote participation (RP) technical infrastructure being put in place for the joint scientific exploitation of the JET Facilities serves as a blueprint for the future shared exploitation of several other large experiments. At the same time the scope of the remote access and remote collaboration is being extended from the purely scientific exploitation to include shared engineering design work for major JET enhancements that are conducted jointly by several laboratories, and for the next-step design work (ITER) as well.