October 3, 2016 – A multi-institution team led by Jefferson Lab’s Robert Edwards has been using Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer to drastically improve modeling subatomic particles using lattice quantum chromodynamics methods. The Jefferson Lab investigators partnered with NVIDIA high-performance computing researcher Kate Clark, who helped create a multigrid algorithm to improve simulations studying the smallest measurable units of matter—quarks, gluons and mesons. The team has seen 7- to 10-fold increases in code performance since implementing the algorithm to take advantage of Titan’s hybrid architecture. The innovation benefits more than just the Edwards team—other research teams are already implementing the algorithm into their own codes.
By leveraging Titan’s hybrid architecture, a multi-institution research team achieved a 7- to 10-fold increase in code performance for LQCD calculations.