The QCD Teraflops project

A number of important physics questions can be decisively addressed using established techniques in lattice QCD with Teraflops-scale computer resources. In particular, evaluation of hadronic weak matrix elements critical to extracting CKM matrix elements and realistic studies of the QCD phase transitions should be possible. A collaboration of nuclear and particle physicists, MIT computer scientists and Lincoln Laboratory engineers are proposing to design and construct such a Teraflops-scale machine, one of whose applications would be these lattice QCD calculations. The machine will be build upon the current Thinking Machines' CM5, using advanced packaging and synchronous DRAM technology to achieve a 10X boost in performance per node. The machine will have a peak speed of 2.6 Tflops, a memory of 1/4 Tbytes and should sustain ∼1.5 Tflops when computing a Dirac propagator on a 1283x256 lattice