Benchmarking MILC code with OpenMP and MPI

A trend in high performance computers that is becoming increasingly popular is the use of symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) rather than the older paradigm of MPP. MPI codes that ran and scaled well on MPP machines can often be run on an SMP machine using the vendor's version of MPI. However, this approach may not make optimal use of the (expensive) SMP hardware. More significantly, there are machines like Blue Horizon, an IBM SP with 8-way SMP nodes at the San Diego Supercomputer Center that can only support 4 MPI processes per node (with the current switch). On such a machine it is imperative to be able to use OpenMP parallelism on the node, and MPI between nodes. We describe the challenges of converting MILC MPI code to using a second level of OpenMP parallelism, and benchmarks on IBM and Sun computers.Comment: Lattice 2000 (Computers), 5 pages, 3 figure

Scale Determination Using the Static Potential with Two Dynamical Quark Flavors

We study the static potential using gauge configurations that include the effects of two flavors of dynamical Kogut-Susskind quarks. The configurations, generated by the MILC collaboration, and used to study the spectrum and heavy-light decay constants, cover a range $5.3 \le 6/g^2 \le 5.6$. There are at least four quark masses for each coupling studied. Determination of $r_0$ from the potential can be used to set a scale. This alternative scale is useful to study systematic errors on the spectrum and decay constants.Comment: LATTICE99(spectrum) - 3 pages, 4 figure

Improved Measure of Local Chirality

It is popular to probe the structure of the QCD vacuum indirectly by studying individual fermion eigenmodes, because this provides a natural way to filter out UV fluctuations. The double-peaking in the distribution of the local chiral orientation parameter (X) has been offered as evidence, by some, in support of a particular model of the vacuum. Here we caution that the X-distribution peaking varies significantly with various versions of the definition of X. Furthermore, each distribution varies little from that resulting from a random reshuffling of the left-handed (and independently the right-handed) fields, which destroys any QCD-induced left-right correlation; that is, the double-peaking is mostly a phase-space effect. We propose a new universal definition of the X parameter whose distribution is uniform for randomly reshuffled fields. Any deviations from uniformity for actual data can then be directly attributable to QCD-induced dynamics. We find that the familiar double peak disappears.Comment: Lattice 2004(topology), Fermilab, June 21-26, 2004; 3 pages, 4 figure

Locality and scaling of quenched overlap fermions

The overlap fermion offers the tremendous advantage of exact chiral symmetry on the lattice, but is numerically intensive. This can be made affordable while still providing large lattice volumes, by using coarse lattice spacing, given that good scaling and localization properties are established. Here, using overlap fermions on quenched Iwasaki gauge configurations, we demonstrate directly that the overlap Dirac operator's range is comfortably small in lattice units for each of the lattice spacings 0.20 fm, 0.17 fm, and 0.13 fm (and scales to zero in physical units in the continuum limit). In particular, our direct results contradict recent speculation that an inverse lattice spacing of $1 {\rm GeV}$ is too low to have satisfactory localization. Furthermore, hadronic masses (available on the two coarser lattices) scale very well.Comment: Lattice 2005 (chiral fermions), 6 pages, 4 figure