ABSTRACT
In many fields of science, comprehensive and realistic computational models are available nowadays. Often, the respective numerical calculations call for the use of powerful supercomputers, and therefore only a limited number of cases can be investigated explicitly. This prevents straightforward approaches to important tasks like uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis. This challenge can be overcome via our recently developed sensitivity-driven dimension-adaptive sparse grid interpolation strategy. The method exploits, via adaptivity, the structure of the underlying model (such as lower intrinsic dimensionality and anisotropic coupling of the uncertain inputs) to enable efficient and accurate uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis at scale. Here, we demonstrate the efficiency of this adaptive approach in the context of fusion research, in a realistic, computationally expensive scenario of turbulent transport in a magnetic confinement tokamak device with eight uncertain parameters, reducing the effort by at least two orders of magnitude. In addition, we show that this refinement method intrinsically provides an accurate surrogate model that is nine orders of magnitude cheaper than the high-fidelity model.Ionuţ-Gabriel Farcaş, Gabriele Merlo and colleagues developed a framework for uncertainty quantification and sensitivity analysis at scale by focusing on important input parameters. The framework was demonstrated to reduce computational effort and cost compared to standard methods in a turbulent transport simulation in the context of fusion research.