SU (2) lattice gauge theory simulations on Fermi GPUs

Journal Article · Tue May 10 00:00:00 EDT 2011 · Journal of Computational Physics

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcp.2011.02.023· OSTI ID:21499744

Cardoso, Nuno ^[1]; Bicudo, Pedro ^[1]

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1. CFTP, Departamento de Fisica, Instituto Superior Tecnico, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa (Portugal)

In this work we explore the performance of CUDA in quenched lattice SU (2) simulations. CUDA, NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture, is a hardware and software architecture developed by NVIDIA for computing on the GPU. We present an analysis and performance comparison between the GPU and CPU in single and double precision. Analyses with multiple GPUs and two different architectures (G200 and Fermi architectures) are also presented. In order to obtain a high performance, the code must be optimized for the GPU architecture, i.e., an implementation that exploits the memory hierarchy of the CUDA programming model. We produce codes for the Monte Carlo generation of SU (2) lattice gauge configurations, for the mean plaquette, for the Polyakov Loop at finite T and for the Wilson loop. We also present results for the potential using many configurations (50,000) without smearing and almost 2000 configurations with APE smearing. With two Fermi GPUs we have achieved an excellent performance of 200x the speed over one CPU, in single precision, around 110 Gflops/s. We also find that, using the Fermi architecture, double precision computations for the static quark-antiquark potential are not much slower (less than 2x slower) than single precision computations.

• OSTI ID: 21499744
• Journal Information: Journal of Computational Physics, Vol. 230, Issue 10; Other Information: DOI: 10.1016/j.jcp.2011.02.023; PII: S0021-9991(11)00112-4; Copyright (c) 2011 Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam, The Netherlands, All rights reserved.; ISSN 0021-9991
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

97 MATHEMATICAL METHODS AND COMPUTING
72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE
COMPUTER CODES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
GAUGE INVARIANCE
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MONTE CARLO METHOD
PERFORMANCE
PROGRAMMING
QUARK-ANTIQUARK INTERACTIONS
SU-2 GROUPS
WILSON LOOP
CALCULATION METHODS
INTERACTIONS
INVARIANCE PRINCIPLES
LIE GROUPS
PARTICLE INTERACTIONS
SIMULATION
SU GROUPS
SYMMETRY GROUPS