Principal Investigators:
Balint Joo is a Computational Scientist working at Jefferson Lab on Lattice QCD calculations. He is a co-author and maintainer of the Chroma code for LQCD calculations, and is one of the original authors of the QPhiX library for Intel® Xeon® processors & Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors. His current main interests are enabling QCD calculations on new architectures, developing and integrating implementations of new algorithms into Chroma, and working to enable successful QCD calculations on upcoming clusters and extreme scale systems.
Chip Watson is the head of Scientific Computing at Jefferson Lab, a group that also encompasses High Performance Computing at the lab. He has been the LQCD Computing architect for a number of Lattice QCD computing resources at the lab, optimizing the configurations of a succession of clusters including conventional x86 machines, GPU accelerated machines, and most recently a Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessor (Knights Corner) cluster. He also leads the deployment and operation of resources for detector simulation and analysis of experimental physics data from the laboratory.
Description:
The Intel® Parallel Computing Center (Intel® PCC) at Jefferson Lab will develop and optimize codes for Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations. Our focus is to enable the freely available Chroma LQCD code, to work with the greatest efficiency on current and future generations of Intel® Xeon® processors and Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor family systems, including the forthcoming Cori system at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) based on the future Intel® Xeon Phi™ processor family, and future systems such as the announced Aurora system at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). These optimizations will be made public, benefiting the worldwide community of Chroma users and other LQCD practitioners.
Due to its layered and modular software architecture, the modernization of Chroma is primarily achieved through developing its sub-component layers. We will focus on two of these, notably the QDP++ data parallel domain-specific productivity layer on which Chroma is built, and QPhiX, which is an open source library of lattice QCD solvers developed in partnership with Intel® Parallel Computing Labs. We will extend QPhiX with additional improved solvers, and investigate design trade-offs which can arise when the problems being solved reside in different levels of the memory hierarchy. An efficient, portable implementation of the QDP++ sub-layer will be provided by QDP-JIT/LLVM package.
In addition we will continue to engage in active collaboration with our partners at Intel® Parallel Computing Labs, the Lattice QCD software community in the US and worldwide, within the U.S. Department of Energy SciDAC program, and engage with other high performance computing centers to share lessons learned and experiences gained during these code-modernization efforts. We will form partnerships with local universities in joint research activities, to further understand the best ways to exploit new multi-core architectures for LQCD calculations and to train the next generation of computational scientists.
The research and development activities outlined above are funded through the U. S. Department of Energy, Offices of Nuclear Physics, High Energy Physics and Advanced Scientific Computing Research and are supported via partner institutions, for example the NERSC Exascale Application Program.
Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (Jefferson Lab) is one of 17 national laboratories funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. The lab also receives support from the City of Newport News and the Commonwealth of Virginia. The lab’s primary mission is to conduct basic research of the atom's nucleus using the lab’s unique particle accelerator, known as the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF). Jefferson Lab also conducts a variety of research using its Free Electron Laser, which is based on the same electron-accelerating technology used in CEBAF. In addition to its science mission, the lab provides programs designed to help educate the next generation in science and technology, and to engage the public. Managing and operating the lab for DOE is Jefferson Science Associates, LLC. JSA is a limited liability company created by Southeastern Universities Research Association and PAE Applied Technologies.
Related websites:
http://jeffersonlab.github.io/qphix/