Don’t stop me now!

Hello everyone, again!

I am very sorry for not writing to you for three weeks, it has been three weeks where we haven’t stopped adding changes and analyzing data in order to show you what we are achieving. In these weeks, we have encountered great challenges that had to be resolved without knowing if we were going to achieve it, now I assure you that we are on the right track. I take no more time and start telling you.

Our project started slowly, with many difficulties and without a path to follow, you have all the details in my previous post. In the same post I also told you that I finally decided to work on graphene, the study of this material is increasing due to its unusual properties, these range from extreme mechanical strength and lightness, through unique electronic properties to several anomalous features in quantum effects.

Experimental research on graphene includes simulations where the properties of strongly interacting matter are studied and can be based on the experience gathered in the Lattice QCD. These simulations require the repeated computation of solutions of extremely sparse linear systems.

My team, at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), has developed a Monte Carlo Hybrid (HMC) method to calculate graphene’s electronic properties using lattice-discretized quantum field theory, a model widely used to make particle physic predictions using HPC. So the objective of the project is to understand how the algorithm works, the parts that surround it and which parts of the code present more complexity to the processor.

Specifically, in these three weeks, we have been working and understanding how to parallelize the computation of solutions of extremely sparse linear systems. Because it accumulates a large amount of computation and therefore becomes a bottleneck (more technical detail about the structure of the algorithm can be found in the original paper, Accelerating Hybrid Monte Carlo simulations of the Hubbard model on the hexagonal lattice).

Now, we only have to get down to work to apply all the theory that we have accumulated in practical improvements in the algorithm. We started with the HPC and openACC part, we started with testing the algorithm and analyzing its performance. Now! We start with everything interesting and the main focus of SoHPC, so don’t stop me now, let’s go.