skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: The Secret Life of Quarks, Final Report for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1062585· OSTI ID:1062585
 [1]
  1. Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC (United States)

This final report summarizes activities and results at the University of North Carolina as part of the the SciDAC-2 Project The Secret Life of Quarks: National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics. The overall objective of the project is to construct the software needed to study quantum chromo- dynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interactions of subatomic physics, and similar strongly coupled gauge theories anticipated to be of importance in the LHC era. It built upon the successful efforts of the SciDAC-1 project National Computational Infrastructure for Lattice Gauge Theory, in which a QCD Applications Programming Interface (QCD API) was developed that enables lat- tice gauge theorists to make effective use of a wide variety of massively parallel computers. In the SciDAC-2 project, optimized versions of the QCD API were being created for the IBM Blue- Gene/L (BG/L) and BlueGene/P (BG/P), the Cray XT3/XT4 and its successors, and clusters based on multi-core processors and Infiniband communications networks. The QCD API is being used to enhance the performance of the major QCD community codes and to create new applications. Software libraries of physics tools have been expanded to contain sharable building blocks for inclusion in application codes, performance analysis and visualization tools, and software for au- tomation of physics work flow. New software tools were designed for managing the large data sets generated in lattice QCD simulations, and for sharing them through the International Lattice Data Grid consortium. As part of the overall project, researchers at UNC were funded through ASCR to work in three general areas. The main thrust has been performance instrumentation and analysis in support of the SciDAC QCD code base as it evolved and as it moved to new computation platforms. In support of the performance activities, performance data was to be collected in a database for the purpose of broader analysis. Third, the UNC work was done at RENCI (Renaissance Computing Institute), which has extensive expertise and facilities for scientific data visualization, so we acted in an ongoing consulting and support role in that area.

Research Organization:
Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE SC Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (SC-21)
DOE Contract Number:
FC02-06ER41445
OSTI ID:
1062585
Report Number(s):
DOE/FG02-06ER41445-1
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English