Communications of the ACM
Supercomputing Subatomic Particle Research on Titan
Researchers at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility are collaborating with Nvidia to develop better quantum chromodynamics codes for graphics-processing units.
Credit: Joanna Griffin/U.S. Department of Energy
A joint project between the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility and NVIDIA is developing improved quantum chromodynamics codes (QCDs) for graphics-processing units (GPUs) using the Titan supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The GlueX experiment seeks to gain new insights into the interactions of subatomic particles.
"We believe there is a theory that describes how elementary particles interact, quarks, and gluons that make up the matter around us," says the Jefferson Lab's Robert Edwards. "If so, the theory of QCD suggests that there are some exotic forms of matter that exist, and that's what we're looking for."
Computing quark-gluon interactions by solving a massive number of Dirac equations is critical to GlueX.
The team is looking for new ways to enhance code performance on the Jefferson researchers' CHROMA code, as detailed at the SC16 conference in November.
NVIDIA's Kate Clark says GPUs are the "glue" in GlueX, thanks to their memory bandwidth. "If you can describe your problem in such a way that GPUs can get maximum use of their memory bandwidth, QCD calculations will go a lot quicker," she notes. "One aspect of GPUs is that they bring a lot of parallelism to the problem, and so to get maximum performance, you may need to restructure your calculation to exploit more parallelism."
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