User-centered approach to analyzing and interacting with stellarator data

Modeling and simulations are an integral part of modern fusion energy science. This makes interacting with data and code output a routine part of contemporary research workflows. In practice, however, interpreting, analyzing, and visualizing these data is often difficult, due to the absence of effective user interfaces. In this work, we take a user-centered approach to designing and developing front-end applications for stellarator physics and optimization applications. Specifically, we build off Julia libraries for manipulating stellarator equilibrium and magnetic field data (PlasmaEquilibriumToolkit.jl and MagneticFieldToolkit.jl) and create front-end applications that allow users to analyze and interact with plasma profiles and configurations developed as part of stellarator optimization routines, for example. We explore the software engineering challenges of interfacing legacy code with modern visualization tools and optimize rendering performance to enable real-time interaction with stellarator data.