Hardware and software status of QCDOC

TL;DR

QCDOC is a highly scalable, cost-effective supercomputer with custom ASICs designed for lattice QCD computations, demonstrating strong performance and reliability in hardware and software implementations.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the hardware and software status of QCDOC, highlighting its design, performance, and scalability for lattice QCD applications.

Findings

Achieved 50% sustained performance on large-scale nodes

First ASICs available in June 2003 with all systems functioning

Performance figures obtained from real hardware and simulations

Abstract

QCDOC is a massively parallel supercomputer whose processing nodes are based on an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This ASIC was custom-designed so that crucial lattice QCD kernels achieve an overall sustained performance of 50% on machines with several 10,000 nodes. This strong scalability, together with low power consumption and a price/performance ratio of $1 per sustained MFlops, enable QCDOC to attack the most demanding lattice QCD problems. The first ASICs became available in June of 2003, and the testing performed so far has shown all systems functioning according to specification. We review the hardware and software status of QCDOC and present performance figures obtained in real hardware as well as in simulation.