CHaRMNET: Center for Hierarchical and Robust Modeling of Non-Equilibrium Transport

The CHaRMNET Mathematical Multifaceted Integrated Capability Center (MMICC) is motivated by the need to develop accurate long-term modeling of plasma systems for fusion energy and national security that are suitable for optimization and uncertainty quantification at the engineering scale. Led by Michigan State University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, CHaRMNET brings together national leaders from five universities and four DOE national labs in the mathematical modeling of plasmas. The center seeks to build a first-of-its-kind holistic approach that will exploit structure within models to mitigate the curse of dimensionality and to bridge a wide range of length and time scales in plasma science. The curse of dimensionality is a critical challenge that is pervasive throughout computational science and refers to the observation that the resources needed to solve a problem on a computer scale exponentially with the dimension of the problem. Fundamental plasma models are seven-dimensional and are presently computationally intractable (with existing mathematical methods and computational resources) to drive optimization and uncertainty quantification at the engineering scale of plasma systems.