The fundamental particle theory called Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) dictates
everything about protons and neutrons, from their intrinsic properties to
interactions that bind them into atomic nuclei. Quantities that cannot be fully
resolved through experiment, such as the neutron lifetime (whose precise value
is important for the existence of light-atomic elements that make the sun shine
and life possible), may be understood through numerical solutions to QCD. We
directly solve QCD using Lattice Gauge Theory and calculate nuclear observables
such as neutron lifetime. We have developed an improved algorithm that
exponentially decreases the time-to solution and applied it on the new CORAL
supercomputers, Sierra and Summit. We use run-time autotuning to distribute GPU
resources, achieving 20% performance at low node count. We also developed
optimal application mapping through a job manager, which allows CPU and GPU
jobs to be interleaved, yielding 15% of peak performance when deployed across
large fractions of CORAL.Comment: 2018 Gordon Bell Finalist: 9 pages, 9 figures; v2: fixed 2 typos and
appended acknowledgement