dorsal/arxiv
View SchemaLattice QCD Calculations on Commodity Clusters at DESY
| Authors | A. Gellrich, D. Pop, P. Wegner, H. Wittig, M. Hasenbusch, K. Jansen |
|---|---|
| Categories | |
| ArXiv ID | physics/0306090 |
| URL | https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0306090 |
Abstract
Lattice Gauge Theory is an integral part of particle physics that requires high performance computing in the multi-Tflops regime. These requirements are motivated by the rich research program and the physics milestones to be reached by the lattice community. Over the last years the enormous gains in processor performance, memory bandwidth, and external I/O bandwidth for parallel applications have made commodity clusters exploiting PCs or workstations also suitable for large Lattice Gauge Theory applications. For more than one year two clusters have been operated at the two DESY sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen, consisting of 32 resp. 16 dual-CPU PCs, equipped with Intel Pentium 4 Xeon processors. Interconnection of the nodes is done by way of Myrinet. Linux was chosen as the operating system. In the course of the projects benchmark programs for architectural studies were developed. The performance of the Wilson-Dirac Operator (also in an even-odd preconditioned version) as the inner loop of the Lattice QCD (LQCD) algorithms plays the most important role in classifying the hardware basis to be used. Using the SIMD Streaming Extensions (SSE/SSE2) on Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon CPUs give promising results for both the single CPU and the parallel version. The parallel performance, in addition to the CPU power and the memory throughput, is nevertheless strongly influenced by the behavior of hardware components like the PC chip-set and the communication interfaces. The paper covers the physics motivation for using PC clusters as well as a system description, operating experiences, and benchmark results for various hardware.
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"abstract": "Lattice Gauge Theory is an integral part of particle physics that requires\nhigh performance computing in the multi-Tflops regime. These requirements are\nmotivated by the rich research program and the physics milestones to be reached\nby the lattice community. Over the last years the enormous gains in processor\nperformance, memory bandwidth, and external I/O bandwidth for parallel\napplications have made commodity clusters exploiting PCs or workstations also\nsuitable for large Lattice Gauge Theory applications. For more than one year\ntwo clusters have been operated at the two DESY sites in Hamburg and Zeuthen,\nconsisting of 32 resp. 16 dual-CPU PCs, equipped with Intel Pentium 4 Xeon\nprocessors. Interconnection of the nodes is done by way of Myrinet. Linux was\nchosen as the operating system. In the course of the projects benchmark\nprograms for architectural studies were developed. The performance of the\nWilson-Dirac Operator (also in an even-odd preconditioned version) as the inner\nloop of the Lattice QCD (LQCD) algorithms plays the most important role in\nclassifying the hardware basis to be used. Using the SIMD Streaming Extensions\n(SSE/SSE2) on Intel\u0027s Pentium 4 Xeon CPUs give promising results for both the\nsingle CPU and the parallel version. The parallel performance, in addition to\nthe CPU power and the memory throughput, is nevertheless strongly influenced by\nthe behavior of hardware components like the PC chip-set and the communication\ninterfaces. The paper covers the physics motivation for using PC clusters as\nwell as a system description, operating experiences, and benchmark results for\nvarious hardware.",
"arxiv_id": "physics/0306090",
"authors": [
"A. Gellrich",
"D. Pop",
"P. Wegner",
"H. Wittig",
"M. Hasenbusch",
"K. Jansen"
],
"categories": [
"physics.comp-ph"
],
"title": "Lattice QCD Calculations on Commodity Clusters at DESY",
"url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0306090"
},
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