Lattice QCD Production on Commodity Clusters at Fermilab

We describe the construction and results to date of Fermilab's three Myrinet-networked lattice QCD production clusters (an 80-node dual Pentium III cluster, a 48-node dual Xeon cluster, and a 128-node dual Xeon cluster). We examine a number of aspects of performance of the MILC lattice QCD code running on these clusters.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 6 pages, LaTeX, 8 eps figures. PSN TUIT00

The beta function and equation of state for QCD with two flavors of quarks

We measure the pressure and energy density of two flavor QCD in a wide range of quark masses and temperatures. The pressure is obtained from an integral over the average plaquette or psi-bar-psi. We measure the QCD beta function, including the anomalous dimension of the quark mass, in new Monte Carlo simulations and from results in the literature. We use it to find the interaction measure, E-3p, yielding non-perturbative values for both the energy density E and the pressure p. uuencoded compressed PostScript file Revised version should work on more PostScript printers.Comment: 24 page

Baryon Density Correlations in High Temperature Hadronic Matter

As part of an ongoing effort to characterize the high temperature phase of QCD, in a numerical simulation using the staggered fermion scheme, we measure the quark baryon density in the vicinity of a fixed test quark at high temperature and compare it with similar measurements at low temperature and at the crossover temperature. We find an extremely weak correlation at high temperature, suggesting that small color singlet clusters are unimportant in the thermal ensemble. We also find that at $T = 0.75\ T_c$ the total induced quark number shows a surprisingly large component attributable to baryonic screening. A companion simulation of a simple flux tube model produces similar results and also suggests a plausible phenomenological scenario: As the crossover temperature is approached from below, baryonic states proliferate. Above the crossover temperature the mean size of color singlet clusters grows explosively, resulting in an effective electrostatic deconfinement.Comment: 26 pp, RevTeX, 12 postscript figures, combined in a single shell archive file. (Also available in 13 postscript files by anonymous ftp from einstein.physics.utah.edu, /pub/milc/paper.sh.Z.