Energy Department Awards Funding for Fusion, Plasma Science Research

The Department of Energy has awarded seven teams a total of $29 million in funding for fusion and plasma energy research.

The teams, comprising 19 institutions, will research artificial intelligence, machine learning, diagnostic data analysis, model extraction and reduction, plasma control, extreme-scale simulation data and data-enhanced prediction related to fusion and plasma sciences. Awardees will also establish new systems for managing, formatting, curating and accessing experimental and simulation data.

Proposals were selected from the DOE Funding Opportunity Announcement for Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Data Resources for Fusion Energy Sciences. Projects funded by the opportunity will last up to three years, the Energy Department said.

The announcement follows two other funding awards the DOE released in August.

On Aug. 25, the department awarded $16 million to seven high-performance computing research projects for materials sciences, atmospheric predictions and other scientific fields. The funding went to national laboratories and academic institutions that applied for grants under the DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research program.

On Aug. 14, the department allocated $11 million to fund 15 projects under the Exploratory Research Extreme-Scale Science program. The projects funded under the program include supercomputing and modeling, quantum and high-end computing, AI/ML and novel computing architectures.