We give an overview of QPACE 2, which is a custom-designed supercomputer based on Intel Xeon Phi processors, developed in a collaboration of Regensburg University and Eurotech. We give some general recommendations for how to write high-performance co
de for the Xeon Phi and then discuss our implementation of a domain-decomposition-based solver and present a number of benchmarks.
In a sector of fixed topological charge, the chiral condensate has a discontinuity given by the Banks-Casher formula also in the case of one-flavor QCD. However, at fixed theta-angle, the chiral condensate remains constant when the quark mass crosses
zero. To reconcile these contradictory observations, we have evaluated the spectral density of one-flavor QCD at theta=0. For negative quark mass, it becomes a strongly oscillating function with a period that scales as the inverse space-time volume and an amplitude that increases exponentially with the space-time volume. As we have learned from QCD at nonzero chemical potential, if this is the case, an alternative to the Banks-Casher formula applies, and as we will demonstrate in this talk, for one-flavor QCD this results in a continuous chiral condensate. A special role is played by the topological zero modes which have to be taken into account exactly in order to get a finite chiral condensate in the thermodynamic limit.
We derive exact analytical expressions for the spectral density of the Dirac operator at fixed theta-angle in the microscopic domain of one-flavor QCD. These results are obtained by performing the sum over topological sectors using novel identities i
nvolving sums of products of Bessel functions. Because the fermion determinant is not positive definite for negative quark mass, the usual Banks-Casher relation is not valid and has to be replaced by a different mechanism first observed for QCD at nonzero chemical potential. Using the exact results for the spectral density we explain how this mechanism results in a chiral condensate that remains constant when the quark mass changes sign.
QPACE is a novel massively parallel architecture optimized for lattice QCD simulations. A single QPACE node is based on the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor. The nodes are interconnected by a custom 3-dimensional torus network implemented on an FPGA. The
compute power of the processor is provided by 8 Synergistic Processing Units. Making efficient use of these accelerator cores in scientific applications is challenging. In this paper we describe our strategies for porting applications to the QPACE architecture and report on performance numbers.
