A Linux PC cluster for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry

TL;DR

This paper presents a custom-built Linux PC cluster with 64 nodes optimized for lattice QCD simulations with exact chiral symmetry, achieving high performance and cost efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a home-made Linux PC cluster tailored for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry, detailing hardware setup and software optimization for efficient computations.

Findings

System achieves 70 Gflops speed.

Cost per performance is under $1.0/Mflops.

Optimizations improve quark propagator calculations.

Abstract

A computational system for lattice QCD with exact chiral symmetry is described. The platform is a home-made Linux PC cluster, built with off-the-shelf components. At present this system constitutes of 64 nodes, with each node consisting of one Pentium 4 processor (1.6/2.0/2.5 GHz), one Gbyte of PC800/PC1066 RDRAM, one 40/80/120 Gbyte hard disk, and a network card. The computationally intensive parts of our program are written in SSE2 codes. The speed of this system is estimated to be 70 Gflops, and its price/performance is better than $1.0/Mflops for 64-bit (double precision) computations in quenched QCD. We discuss how to optimize its hardware and software for computing quark propagators via the overlap Dirac operator.