This is the final report of a panel established as a subcommittee of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) Fusion Energy Sciences Committee (FESAC) on Integrated Simulation and Optimization of Magnetic Fusion Systems (ISOFS). The report was requested by the DOE in February 2002 and the approved report was transmitted to the DOE by the FESAC in December 2002. The report addresses the challenge of how to “develop fully integrated capability for predicting the performance of externally-controlled systems including turbulent transport, macroscopic stability, wave-particle physics, and multi-phase interfaces.”

In February, 2002, the DOE Office of Science asked the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC) to assist in defining a major new initiative to be sponsored jointly by the Office of Fusion Energy Sciences and the Office of Advanced Computer Science Research. The goal of this initiative, the Fusion Simulation Project (FSP), is to create a comprehensive set of theoretical fusion models, an architecture for bringing together the disparate physics models, combined with the algorithms and computational infrastructure that enables the models to work together. The required funding level is expected to be on the order of $100M spread over five to six years. A FESAC ISOFS (Integrated Simulation and Optimization of Fusion Systems) Subcommittee, with members from the fusion, applied mathematics and computer science communities, has been constituted to generate a plan for moving forward with the FSP.