BERLIN, Germany, May 13 — A large-scale research project in computational elementary particle physics, carried out on GCS supercomputers, attracted the attention of scientists from all around the world. The simulations run by a research team of the Bergische Universität Wuppertal under leadership of Professor Zoltán Fodor resulted in finally calculating the small neutron-proton mass difference, a fundamental quantity. The report, published by Fodor et al. in the renowned SCIENCE magazine on March 27 even prompted Professor Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), acclaimed winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004, to recognize the work of the Wuppertal-based researchers as well as emphasize the importance of the availability of such powerful supercomputers.
The findings of the project “Lattice QCD Investigations of Nuclear and Hadronic Properties,” carried out by Fodor and his team, are considered a milestone by many physicists as they validate the theory of quantum chromodynamics describing the strong interaction in the standard model. In an article, published in the “News & Views” section of the no-less prestigious NATURE magazine, Wilczek elaborates on the “breakthrough progress” reached by the German, French and Hungarian researchers and the “technical achievement that pushes the envelope of available computer power,” which gives scientists reason to hope for “much more accurate modelling” in the very near future to address upcoming big scientific challenges.
“The difference in mass between proton and neutron is one of the most fundamental quantities in nuclear physics, and its calculation is cause for celebration,” asserts Professor Wilczek. “It should now be possible, theoretically, to compute many other aspects of nuclear behaviour that will give us much better knowledge of how stars evolve, their explosions into supernovae, and of the weird objects – neutron stars – that result. We can also look forward to better control of nuclear chemistry here on Earth. These brilliant prospects are open before us, but they will require investment in advanced computers, and the hard work of a new generation of trained researchers,” adds Wilczek.
“Not only is the appreciation of the research work by the Nobel Laureate Professor Frank Wilczek a great honour for the research group under the lead of Professor Zoltán Fodor from the University of Wuppertal, it is the very confirmation by this international authority on Quantum Chromodynamics that the strategy of the GCS in HPC provisioning and supercomputing technology is on the right track to foster ground-breaking results,” explains Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert, GCS Chairman of the Board.
The project comprising tens of millions of compute core hours was run on petascale supercomputer JUQUEEN of Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) with support from the HPC systems SuperMUC of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre in Garching/Munich (LRZ) and Hermit of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). A share of the simulation hours was also granted by PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, on systems of GCS’s partner institution in France, GENCI.
About GCS
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercom- puting centres HLRS (High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0 supercomputing institution. Concertedly, the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe to serve a wide range of industrial and research activities in various disciplines. They also provide top-class training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advance Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 25 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.
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Source: GCS