  AI accelerators have proliferated in data centers in recent years and are now
almost ubiquitous. In addition, their computational power and, most
importantly, their energy efficiency are up to orders of magnitude higher than
that of traditional computing. Over the last years, various methods and
optimizations have been tested to use these hybrid systems for simulations in
the context of astroparticle physics utilizing CORSIKA. The main focus of this
talk is the propagation of optical, i.e. fluorescence and Cherenkov, photons
through low density inhomogeneous media in the context of the next generation
CORSIKA8 simulation framework. Different techniques used and approximations,
e.g. the atmospheric model, tested during the development will be presented.
The trade-off between performance and precision allows the experiment to
achieve its physical precision limited to the real resolution of the experiment
and not invest power and time in vanishing precision gains. The additional
comparison of classical CPU-based simulations with the new methods validates
these methods and allows evaluation against a known baseline.

Computational Physics;Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics