QCDOC: A 10 Teraflops Computer for Tightly-Coupled Calculations
P. A. Boyle, Daihang Chen, Norman H. Christ, M. A. Clark, Saul D. Cohen, Zhihua Dong, Alan Gara, Bálint Joó, Chulwoo Jung, L. Levkova, Xiaodong Liao, Guofeng Liu, Robert D. Mawhinney, Shigemi Ohta, K. Petrov, Tilo Wettig, Akinobu Yamaguchi, C. Cristian · 2005
Numerical simulations of the strong nuclear force, known as quantum chromodynamics or QCD, have proven to be a demanding, forefront problem in high-performance computing. In this report, we describe a new computer, QCDOC (QCD On a Chip), designed for optimal price/performance in the study of QCD. QCDOC uses a six-dimensional, low-latency mesh network to connect processing nodes, each of which includes a single custom ASIC, designed by our collaboration and built by IBM, plus DDR SDRAM. Each node has a peak speed of 1Gigaflops and two 12,288node, 10+ Teraflops machines are to be completed in the fall of 2004. Currently, a 512 node machine is running, delivering efficiencies as high as 45% of peak on the conjugate gradient solvers that dominate our calculations and a 4096-node machine with a cost of $1.6M is under construction. This should give us a price/performance less than $1per sustained Megaflops.