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Article #18995, December 1 2000
Reproduced, with permission, from HPCwire.
Cambridge, MASS. - The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory
for Nuclear Science (LNS) announced a research collaboration with Compaq
Computer Corp. of Houston to develop a cluster of extremely powerful computers
capable of doing calculations that will help researchers understand the
structure of subatomic particles. Calculating the structure of the proton from
first principles requires a computer that can achieve one teraflops - the
ability to compute 1 trillion floating point operations in one second.
Using a conventional supercomputer for this calculation could cost up to
$500 million. A large special purpose computer would cost approximately $10
million per sustained teraflops, but would lack the programming flexibility
needed by physics researchers.
Under the research agreement, LNS has purchased a 64 gigaflops prototype
cluster of 12 Compaq AlphaServer ES40 systems and will collaborate with Compaq
to optimize its performance for fundamental physics calculations.
"The goal of the MIT-Compaq collaboration is to create a network of
AlphaServer computers running the Open Source Linux operating system that will
be far more flexible than special purpose machines at a much lower cost than
conventional supercomputers," said Bill Blake, Compaq's vice president for
high performance technical computing. "With Alpha's exceptional floating point
performance and high memory bandwidth, it is the processor of choice for such
high-performance scientific clusters."
The cluster will be used for research in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) -
which describes how protons and other strongly interacting particles are built
out of quarks and gluons, the basic building blocks of matter - and related
computationally intensive science problems.
Robert L. Jaffe, professor of physics and director of MIT's Center for
Theoretical Physics (CTP), said, "The computational approach to QCD represents
one of the most promising means of unraveling this puzzling and fascinating
theory. This field is certainly only in its infancy, with many dramatic
achievements lying ahead. We are very pleased to have this world-class
initiative embedded within the CTP, where we can share insights with some of
the world's finest computational physicists."
The discovery of the quarks as the fundamental constituents of the proton 30
years ago by Nobel laureates Jerome Friedman and Henry Kendall of MIT and
Richard Taylor of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center laid the foundation
for quantum chromodynamics.
QCD describes how protons and other strongly interacting particles that
comprise most of the known mass of the universe are built out of quarks and
gluons. The only way to solve QCD is by numerical computation, and with the
advent of terascale computers, it is now possible to calculate the quark and
gluon structure of matter from first principles.
The MIT-Compaq initiative, led by nuclear theorist John W. Negele, William
A. Coolidge Professor of Physics at MIT, has as its next step a proposal by
MIT and Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, VA, to
add two additional large Alpha clusters to bring the total resources of the
two institutions to half a teraflops.
Based on the success of this half-teraflops project, the next phase would be
a multi-teraflops cluster based on Compaq's EV-7 technology, which places all
the essential functions of the present Alpha system on a single chip.
A team of 22 physicists from 13 institutions in the Lattice Hadron Physics
Collaboration will use the MIT and JLab clusters to calculate in detail the
quark structure of the proton.
"Research in theoretical nuclear physics always has been one of the
strengths of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science. This new initiative will
allow LNS to remain at the forefront of this field," said June Matthews,
director of the LNS.
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