Ushering the US integrated modeling community into the ITER IMAS era*

The Integrated Modeling and Analysis Suite (IMAS) ontology defines a standard for organizing ITER's experimental and simulation data. To interpret, understand, and exploit ITER's data the US will want to apply its most advanced modeling tools to it. We report on two ongoing software development efforts that work in tandem to address such needs. The first effort targets OMAS [https://gafusion.github.io/omas], an open source Python library designed to facilitate the manipulation of data consistent with the IMAS ontology. OMAS has been extended to enable efficient on-the-fly translation of experimental data to IMAS. The method is being widely applied to DIII-D and NSTX-U data. The second effort targets the physics workflows within the OMFIT [https://omfit.io] framework, which have been adapted to work with OMAS data. Not only are the resulting workflows now machine independent, but they are also compatible with how ITER will store its data. Such developments mark an important milestone towards a wider adoption of IMAS in the US, and the overall readiness of US modeling and analysis tools when ITER becomes operational.