Computer modeling of plasma: Past, present, and future

Computer modeling has become a powerful tool for exploring the physics of plasmas. Early computers could handle only relatively simple models but nevertheless showed that these devices could shed a lot of light on the complex physics of plasmas. This capability has proved not only valuable to research but also is becoming an important teaching tool; modeling allows students to experience in concrete ways plasma phenomena which are otherwise presented only abstractly. Present-day plasma models combined with parallel computing provide sufficient power that numerical modeling of laboratory experiments on complex devices has become possible. Two examples of simulations are discussed in some detail: The ''Beat Wave Accelerator'' and the ''Numerical Tokamak.''