QCD Simulations: Minuscule Particles, Gigantic Computations
June 30, 2003
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QCD simulation of "quark confinement." The energy between two heavy quarks increases with the distance between them. Computation of the distance at which this "flux tube" will break is a "grand challenge" (petaflop) computer simulation problem. Image and computation produced by the computational physics group at Universit�t Wuppertal.
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.