Scaling Lattice QCD beyond 100 GPUs
Abstract
Over the past five years, graphics processing units (GPUs) have had a transformational effect on numerical lattice quantum chromodynamics (LQCD) calculations in nuclear and particle physics. While GPUs have been applied with great success to the post-Monte Carlo "analysis" phase which accounts for a substantial fraction of the workload in a typical LQCD calculation, the initial Monte Carlo "gauge field generation" phase requires capability-level supercomputing, corresponding to O(100) GPUs or more. Such strong scaling has not been previously achieved. In this contribution, we demonstrate that using a multi-dimensional parallelization strategy and a domain-decomposed preconditioner allows us to scale into this regime. We present results for two popular discretizations of the Dirac operator, Wilson-clover and improved staggered, employing up to 256 GPUs on the Edge cluster at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1109.2935,
title = {Scaling Lattice QCD beyond 100 GPUs},
author = {R. Babich and M. A. Clark and B. Joó and G. Shi and R. C. Brower and S. Gottlieb},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1109.2935},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
11 pages, 10 figures, to appear in the proceedings of the 2011 ACM/IEEE International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC'11)