Lattice QCD

Parallel benchmark programs



Lattice QCD simulation programs spend most of their time in the programs that apply the lattice Dirac operator to a given quark field. A significant fraction of the time is also needed for the computation of scalar products and linear combinations of such fields. Moreover, on parallel computers the communication overhead can slow down the simulations considerably.

Benchmark programs

The programs provided here are simple synthetic speed tests that measure the computer time required for some frequently performed operations in a typical lattice QCD calculation. There are two sets of programs, one testing the network performance and the other measuring the time required for some basic QCD programs. The latter are optimized for the common x86 processors, but should perform well on other processors too. See the conference report

   M. Lüscher, Lattice QCD on PCs?,   Nucl. Phys. B (Proc. Suppl.) 106 (2002) 21 ( ScienceDirect , arXiv.org )

for some background information and early benchmark results.

The programs parallelize in 0,1,2,3 or 4 dimensions using standard MPI communication routines. They are intended for measurements of the QCD performance of workstations, SMP machines and massively parallel machines. The only prerequisites are an ISO C89 compliant C compiler and an MPI implementation that complies with the MPI standard 1.2.

Download

The package QCDpbm-1.1.tar.gz contains the benchmark programs, usage instructions and some further documentation files. After unpacking, first read the README file in the top directory.

License

The software may be used under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) .


Last updated 20 February 2015