Threaded Miami: Masha Petrova of Nullspace!

What if the real problem in electromagnetic simulation is not user workflow, but the solver itself?In this Day 2 Threaded Miami session, Masha Petrova of Nullspace makes exactly that argument. Her claim is blunt: the core electromagnetic solvers most of industry still relies on were built decades ago for very different computing environments, and they are no longer good enough for the scale and complexity of modern RF, radar, satellite, automotive, and defense problems. Masha explains why this matters now. Electromagnetic systems are everywhere, but the hard part is not simulating an antenna in isolation. The hard part is simulating that antenna on the real platform it lives on: a satellite, a drone, a car roof, a larger system where the surrounding body fundamentally changes performance. That is where legacy tools start to break down, forcing engineers to decompose problems, approximate more aggressively, or move into physical prototyping earlier than they want. Nullspace was built to attack that gap directly. Masha positions the company as a modern full-wave 3D electromagnetic solver designed for electrically large problems, with a proprietary matrix-compression approach and multi-CPU, multi-GPU acceleration. Her pitch is not that Nullspace is a lightweight wrapper around old tools. It is that the underlying numerical engine has been rebuilt for current hardware and current problem scale. The talk gets especially strong when she grounds it in concrete examples. She walks through antenna-on-platform use cases like CubeSats and automotive shark-fin antennas, showing why the real-world body changes the electromagnetic behavior enough that isolated component simulation is not sufficient. She also highlights phased-array antenna problems, where Nullspace reportedly scales to larger cases with lower memory consumption than incumbent tools in a benchmark run by a defense customer. Another timely angle is AI readiness. Masha notes that Nullspace is built around a Python API, which makes it easier to integrate into the new generation of AI-driven engineering workflows. Her point is practical: if AI tools are going to help automate simulation setup and execution, they need tools underneath them that already speak the language of modern automation. This is a useful episode for anyone in RF, electromagnetics, aerospace, automotive, defense, or engineering software. It is not a generic “AI for simulation” story. It is a direct challenge to the assumption that the old solver layer is good enough.#ThreadedMiami #Nullspace #Electromagnetics #Simulation #RF #Radar #Aerospace #DefenseTech #EngineeringSoftware #CAE #AI