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arXiv · 1109.2935

Scaling Lattice QCD beyond 100 GPUs

R. Babich·M. A. Clark·B. Joó·G. Shi·R. C. Brower·S. Gottlieb
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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.

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R. Babich, M. A. Clark, B. Joó, G. Shi, R. C. Brower, S. Gottlieb. 2011-09-13. Scaling Lattice QCD beyond 100 GPUs. https://doi.org/10.1145/2063384.2063478

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