{"id":3153,"date":"2023-09-06T16:18:21","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T16:18:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/2023\/09\/06\/a-powerful-legacy-researchers-mom-fueled-passion-for-nuclear-fusion\/"},"modified":"2023-09-06T16:18:21","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T16:18:21","slug":"a-powerful-legacy-researchers-mom-fueled-passion-for-nuclear-fusion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/2023\/09\/06\/a-powerful-legacy-researchers-mom-fueled-passion-for-nuclear-fusion\/","title":{"rendered":"A Powerful Legacy: Researcher\u2019s Mom Fueled Passion for Nuclear Fusion"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Editor\u2019s note: This is part of <\/i>a series<\/i><\/a> profiling researchers advancing science with high performance computing.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Before she entered high school, Ge Dong wanted to be a physicist like her mom, a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe said clean energy was really important for sustaining humanity, she talked about it a lot,\u201d said Ge Dong (above at age two with her mom).<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Picture<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Ge Dong<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At 32, she\u2019s following that dream at a startup that hopes to find \u2014 with the help of HPC<\/a> and AI \u2014 a commercial path to nuclear fusion.<\/p>\n

Pioneering AI in Physics<\/b><\/h2>\n

In 2014, her life\u2019s work took her more than 7,000 miles from her Shanghai home to Princeton University\u2019s prestigious plasma physics lab, where she earned a Ph.D.<\/p>\n

Her doctoral thesis was built on advances by Princeton colleagues. They were the first to use AI to predict plasma disruptions that could cause a fusion reactor to fail.<\/p>\n

Ge Dong\u2019s work shed light on how the edges of plasma, hotter than the surface of the sun, behave inside a prototype fusion reactor, a donut-shaped enclosure called a tokamak.<\/p>\n

Later, she spent more than a year working with her colleagues and NVIDIA experts to create with NVIDIA Omniverse<\/a> a digital twin<\/a> to show how plasma circles inside a tokamak. Using AI, the effort slashed the costs of a simulation based on traditional number-crunching methods.<\/p>\n

The results may help engineers build controls that keep superheated plasma safely inside tomorrow\u2019s power plants, speeding the arrival of the clean energy source.<\/p>\n

A Pivotal Conversation<\/b><\/h2>\n

During the Covid lockdown, Ge Dong returned to Shanghai to work from home. There, in 2021, a pivotal conversation with a friend, Zhou Yang, led to the decision to co-found Energy Singularity<\/a>, a startup with an ambitious plan.<\/p>\n

Yang said he wanted to build a tokamak. When she dismissed the multibillion-dollar idea, he gave a detailed breakdown of a plan that would cost far less.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Picture<\/p>\n

<\/a>

The Energy Singularity team with their superconducting magnets.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Then he explained why he wanted to take an approach, popular among researchers, of using high-temperature superconducting magnets to control the plasma. Even though he studied a separate branch of physics, he could explain the rationale down to its fundamental equations.<\/p>\n

After their talk, \u201cI was so excited, I didn\u2019t sleep the whole night,\u201d she said of the bold plan.<\/p>\n

A few months later, they joined three others to launch the company.<\/p>\n

A Fresh Challenge for AI<\/b><\/h2>\n

Learning how to build and control the powerful, but fragile magnets is the startup\u2019s chief technical challenge. The team is turning to HPC and AI to find its way.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a whole new area of research that\u2019s ripe for the kind of statistical analysis AI can accelerate to deliver the most effective and lowest cost approach,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The startup is already designing its prototype on an NVIDIA-accelerated server in its office.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been using NVIDIA GPUs for all our research, they\u2019re one of the most important tools in plasma physics these days,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The Next Generation<\/b><\/h2>\n

The work can be all-consuming. No one on the team has had time to check out the free gym in their building. And it\u2019s been a while since Ge Dong had a good game of badminton, a favorite pastime.<\/p>\n

But she remains upbeat. Within a decade, someone will show the way to harnessing nuclear fusion, and it could be her company, she said.<\/p>\n

Ge Dong is sure her five-year-old daughter will see her intense passion for plasma physics. But when it comes time to choose a career, she may hear a different calling in a fusion-powered world.<\/p>\n

Check out other profiles in this series:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/blogs.nvidia.com\/blog\/2023\/09\/06\/ai-hpc-energy-fusion\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":3154,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3153"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3153\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}