David Kirtley

more of that electrical engineering.

We start with the SPICE model and use that to drive the plasma physics model.

And that's one level of simulation.

We use that to do design work and then also to try to understand how we think the machine will run.

But then we go one level deeper and we start thinking about particles.

And we think about the ions and we treat the ions as particles.

And we look at the ion behavior.

And for that one, the computational resources are several orders of magnitude larger.

Luckily, a lot of the work in GPUs, the AI data center work, is directly applicable to those simulations.

It's been able to speed up our work, which is pretty fascinating.

That's a whole other tangent we can go down.

Those...

Hybrid codes, we call them, particle and cell codes, now treat the ions as particles.

And that lets us measure and simulate the behavior.

I mentioned the stability criteria, S star over E, the top behavior.

That behavior, we now need these more advanced codes to be able to simulate.

And those are more modern.

Those we've only been able to apply in practice for the last few years, actually, which is pretty fascinating.

That the old stability rules were built off of

testing, empirical tests, where now we can simulate that and we know why they work and how they work and we can do some predictions on them.