The TEAM workshops: A short history

Early in 1985, Sam Berk of the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy, suggested that the development and validation of 3-D eddy current codes would benefit from the compilation of benchmark problems that could be used to validate the codes and from a series of workshops for the comparison of solution methods and codes. (Two years later, at the first International Symposium on Fusion Nuclear Technology in Tokyo, Sam Berk proposed the acronym TEAM for the workshops.) At a three-day planning meeting at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in November 1985, eleven participants from five countries defined the goals, format, schedule and problems for the workshops. The ultimate goal is to show the effectiveness of numerical techniques and associated computer codes in solving electromagnetic field problems, and to gain confidence in their predictions. The workshops should also provide cooperation between workers, leading to an interchange of ideas. This note reviews the three cycles of workshops and the problems