Recent development and perspectives of machines for lattice QCD

Abstract

I am going to highlight recent progress in cluster computer technology and to assess status and prospects of cluster computers for lattice QCD with respect to the development of QCDOC and apeNEXT. Taking the LatFor test case, I specify a 512-processor QCD-cluster better than 1$/Mflops.

Performance of machines for lattice QCD simulations

“…PC clusters have been reviewed at previous LATTICE conferences [14,15] and were presented this year as well [16]. Clearly, they are a sensible choice for many (lattice and non-lattice) groups.…”

APENet: LQCD clusters à la APE

“…Recent works in LQCD numerical application area [2,3,4] have shown an increasing interest on clusters of commodity PC's. This is mainly due to two facts: good sustained performance of commodity processors on numerical applications and slowly emerging low latency, high bandwidth network interconnects.…”