ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the appetite for modern surrogate modeling technology by introducing four challenging real-data settings. Each comes with a brief description of the data and application and a cursory exploratory analysis. Before building prototypes, at enormous expense to taxpayers, National Aeronautics and Space Administration designed a computer simulation to explore the dynamics of the booster in a variety of synthesized environments and design configurations. Simulations entailed solving computational fluid dynamics systems of differential equations, and the primary study regime focused on dynamics upon re-entry into the atmosphere. The University of Michigan’s Center for Radiative Shock Hydrodynamics is tasked with modeling a particular high-energy laser radiative shock system. They developed a mathematical model and computer implementation that simulates a field apparatus, located at the Omega laser facility at the University of Rochester. One challenge is to identify a modeling apparatus that can cope with data sizes, while maintaining the richness of fidelity required to describe and learn underlying dynamics.
