QCDOC Computing

at Brookhaven National Laboratory

BNL hosts two 12,288 nodes (10+ TeraFlops) QCDOC machines: one for the RBRC community funded by the RIKEN laboratory and one for the US Lattice Gauge Theory community funded by the US Department of Energy. A third QCDOC machine for the UKQCD collaboration is located in Edinburgh, Scotland and is funded by PPARC.

The QCDOC (QCD On a Chip) architecture has been designed to provide a highly cost-effective, massively parallel computer capably of focusing significant computing resources on relatively small but extremely demanding problems. The individual processing nodes are PowerPC-based and interconnected in a six-dimensional, low-latency mesh network with the topology of a torus. Each node, designed by our collaboration and built by IBM, includes a single custom ASIC plus DDR SDRAM. It has a peak speed of 1 Gigaflops. More information about this architecture can be found on the following QCDOC architecture and recent publication web pages.

QCDOC design is a natural evolution of that used in our earlier QCDSP machines (Quantum Chromodynamics on Digital Signal Processors). QCDSP incorporated a low-latency four-dimensional mesh network to realize peak speeds of 1 Teraflops with 20,000 nodes. QCDSP won the Gordon Bell prize at Supercomputing 98 and was acknowledged as the world’s fastest non-commercial supercomputer. A separate evolution of the regular mesh architecture of QCDSP is represented by IBM’s Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which uses a three-dimensional mesh, will incorporate up to 64,000 processing nodes and has a peak speed of 360 Teraflops.

QCD On a Chip

Ed McFadden and Joe DePace show off a QCDOC mother board which holds 64 nodes as a 2⁶ hypercube which breaks down to 32 physical Daughter Boards. Each QCDOC daughter board holds two nodes and their associated DIMMs.

More information:

• Publication: QCDOC: A 10 Teraflops Computer for Tightly-coupled Calculations (pdf)
• QCDOC Project Hardware

Last Modified: September 3, 2008

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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