Lattice QCD with overlap fermions on GPUs

Abstract

Lattice QCD is widely considered the correct theory of the strong force and is able to make quantitative statements in the low energy regime where perturbation theory is not applicable. The partition function of lattice QCD can be mapped onto a statistical mechanics system which then allows for the use of calculational methods such as Monte Carlo simulations. In recent years, the enormous success of GPU programming has also arrived at the lattice community. In this article, we give a short overview of Lattice QCD and motivate this need for large computing power. In our simulations we concentrate on a specific fermionic discretization, so-called Neuberger-Dirac fermions, which respect an exact chiral symmetry. We will discuss the algorithms we use in our GPU implementation which turns out to be an order of magnitude faster then the conventional CPU-equivalent. As an application we present results on the eigenvalue spectra in QCD and compare them to analytical calculations from Random Matrix Theory.