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Editor’s observe: That is a part of a series profiling researchers advancing science with excessive efficiency computing.
Earlier than she entered highschool, Ge Dong needed to be a physicist like her mother, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong College.
“She stated clear vitality was actually necessary for sustaining humanity, she talked about it so much,” stated Ge Dong (above at age two along with her mother).
At 32, she’s following that dream at a startup that hopes to seek out — with the assistance of HPC and AI — a business path to nuclear fusion.
Pioneering AI in Physics
In 2014, her life’s work took her greater than 7,000 miles from her Shanghai residence to Princeton College’s prestigious plasma physics lab, the place she earned a Ph.D.
Her doctoral thesis was constructed on advances by Princeton colleagues. They had been the primary to make use of AI to foretell plasma disruptions that might trigger a fusion reactor to fail.
Ge Dong’s work make clear how the sides of plasma, hotter than the floor of the solar, behave inside a prototype fusion reactor, a donut-shaped enclosure referred to as a tokamak.
Later, she spent greater than a yr working along with her colleagues and NVIDIA specialists to create with NVIDIA Omniverse a digital twin to indicate how plasma circles inside a tokamak. Utilizing AI, the trouble slashed the prices of a simulation based mostly on conventional number-crunching strategies.
The outcomes might assist engineers construct controls that preserve superheated plasma safely inside tomorrow’s energy crops, dashing the arrival of the clear vitality supply.
A Pivotal Dialog
Throughout the Covid lockdown, Ge Dong returned to Shanghai to work at home. There, in 2021, a pivotal dialog with a buddy, Zhao Yang, led to the choice to co-found Energy Singularity, a startup with an bold plan.
Yang stated he needed to construct a tokamak. When she dismissed the multibillion-dollar concept, he gave an in depth breakdown of a plan that might value far much less.
Then he defined why he needed to take an method, common amongst researchers, of utilizing high-temperature superconducting magnets to manage the plasma. Despite the fact that he studied a separate department of physics, he may clarify the rationale right down to its elementary equations.
After their discuss, “I used to be so excited, I didn’t sleep the entire night time,” she stated of the daring plan.
A number of months later, they joined three others to launch the corporate.
A Recent Problem for AI
Studying tips on how to construct and management the highly effective, however fragile magnets is the startup’s chief technical problem. The workforce is popping to HPC and AI to seek out its manner.
“It’s an entire new space of analysis that’s ripe for the sort of statistical evaluation AI can speed up to ship the simplest and lowest value method,” she stated.
The startup is already designing its prototype on an NVIDIA-accelerated server in its workplace.
“We’ve been utilizing NVIDIA GPUs for all our analysis, they’re one of the vital necessary instruments in plasma physics nowadays,” she stated.
The Subsequent Technology
The work could be all-consuming. Nobody on the workforce has had time to take a look at the free fitness center of their constructing. And it’s been some time since Ge Dong had a very good sport of badminton, a favourite pastime.
However she stays upbeat. Inside a decade, somebody will present the best way to harnessing nuclear fusion, and it could possibly be her firm, she stated.
Ge Dong is bound her five-year-old daughter will see her intense ardour for plasma physics. However when it comes time to decide on a profession, she might hear a distinct calling in a fusion-powered world.
Try different profiles on this sequence:
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