Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme

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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne

HK 21: Theorie

HK 21.7: Talk

Tuesday, March 11, 2008, 10:15–10:30, 2F

QCD on the Cell Broadband Engine — •Nils Meyer for the QPACE collaboration — Department of Physics, University of Regensburg, 93040 Regensburg, Germany

We evaluate IBM's Enhanced Cell Broadband Engine (BE) as a possible building block of a new generation of lattice QCD machines. The Enhanced Cell BE will provide full support of double precision floating-point arithmetics, including IEEE-compliant rounding. We have developed a performance model and applied it to relevant lattice QCD kernels. The performance estimates are supported by micro- and application-benchmarks that have been obtained on currently available Cell BE-based computers, such as IBM QS20 blades and PlayStation 3. The results are encouraging and show that this processor is an interesting option for lattice QCD applications. For a massively parallel machine on the basis of the Cell BE, an application-optimized network needs to be developed.