QCD Simulations: Minuscule Particles, Gigantic Computations

June 30, 2003

Quarks are the constituents of the heavy elementary particles and as such behave strangely. The three quarks that make up a proton, for example, cannot be observed separately. The physical theory that explains quarks, QCD (quantum chromodynamics), is also special: Getting explicit information from the theory---like predicting the mass of the proton---is a task that requires enormous computational efforts.

Lattice QCD simulations are a challenge for today's and tomorrow's (petaflop) supercomputers. Indeed, the QCD community has been the driving force in several efforts to develop future high-performance computers. Because the core computations reduce to the solution of linear systems and the calculation of matrix functionals for very large matrices, lattice QCD simulations are also a challenge for numerical linear algebra. Efficient methods require techniques that exploit the structure, the nontrivial symmetries, and other special properties of these matrices.---Andreas Frommer, Fachbereich Mathematik, Universit�t Wuppertal.

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