National Software Infrastructure for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics

摘要

Quantum chromodynamics (QCD) is the widely accepted theory of the strong interactions of quarks and gluons. Only through large scale numerical simulation has it been possible to work out the predictions of this theory for a vast range of phenomena relevant to the US Department of Energy experimental program. Such simulations are essential to support the discovery of new phenomena and more fundamental interactions. With support from SciDAC the USQCD collaboration has developed software and prototyped custom computer hardware to carry out the required numerical simulations. We have developed a robust, portable data-parallel code suite. It provides a user-friendly basis for writing physics application codes for carrying out the calculations needed to predict the phenomenology of QCD. We are using this efficient and optimized code base to develop new physics application code, to improve the performance of legacy code, and to construct higher level tools, such as QCD-specific sparse matrix solvers. We give a brief overview of the design of the data parallel API and its various components. We describe performance gains achieved in the past year. Finally, we present plans for further improvements under SciDAC-2.