The Memory Bottleneck on Lattice QCD Codes

 

Abstract

Lattice Quantum ChromoDynamics (Lattice QCD) is the numerical simulation of the strong force interactions between quarks and gluons. LQCD simulations require very large scale supercomputers, with typical calculations consuming Tflop/sec-yrs. Memory bandwidth limits the performance of these codes on commodity computers. In this talk we will give a simple introduction to LQCD codes and describe their core math kernels, as well as discuss a synthetic benchmark (qcdstream) that uses the kernels. The benchmark includes naive memory prefetching. Based on the results, we believe that better prefetching could result in significant performance improvement.

Short Bio

Dr. Don Holmgren is a member of the Software Coordinating Committee of the SciDAC Lattice QCD Computing Project. A staff member at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory since 1995, Dr. Holmgren works in the areas of high performance data acquisition for experiments and parallel computing for lattice QCD calculations. He has lead the lattice QCD project in the Computing Division at Fermilab since 1999. Dr. Holmgren holds a PhD in Experimental Condensed Matter Physics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

 

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