3D NLTE Radiative Transfer - Current Status and Future Prospects

The current status and future prospects for methods of 3D NLTE radiative transfer are reviewed. Scaling properties and parallelization issues are discussed. Codes of today are capable of solving the diagnostic problem (given model atmosphere) with atomic models of 20-100 levels making possible detailed 3D NLTE determinations of abundances employing 3D LTE model atmospheres. Calculating consistent 3D NLTE radiation hydrodynamic models is orders of magnitude more demanding computationally but methods exist that give a reasonably correct description of the radiation interactions in a statistical sense.