Federal and state governments investing 1.1 million Euros

Bielefeld University's Faculty of Physics is getting a new high-performance computer. Researchers will be using it to study strongly interacting matter in order to learn about the properties of matter as it existed in the early universe immediately after the Big Bang.  The supercomputer, costing 1.1 million Euros, is being financed with federal and state government funds. On Wednesday 25 January from 4 p.m. onwards, it will be presented at an inauguration colloquium in the university lecture hall H2.

Bielefeld's physicists will be using this new high-performance computer to calculate properties of so-called 'quarks' and 'gluons'. Quarks are considered to be the elementary constituents of all known matter. They interact through the exchange of force particles, the gluons. The physicists particularly want to find out what happens when quarks are placed under very high temperatures or extreme density. With their previous computer, apeNEXT, they have already been able to determine very precisely that the behaviour of quarks changes dramatically at a temperature of 1.78 billion degrees. Although this temperature is approximately 100,000 times higher than that at the core of our sun, it is not unnaturally high. In its early phase shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was even hotter. This was the time when the foundations were laid for the further development of the cosmos, and this is why the properties of the 'quark soup', the quark–gluon plasma, are so important for understanding the current state of the universe.

To study the ‘beginning of the universe' experimentally, researchers are using particle accelerators to create dense matter like those prevailing in the early universe. They can do this for a short time in a small volume with the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organisation for Nuclear Research CERN and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven, New York. In close cooperation with researchers at these two locations, the new Bielefeld computer will be used to study the quark–gluon plasma in detail through computer simulations.

Two companies, sysGen GmbH and NVIDIA, are working together with the University in order to install the high-performance computer. sysGen GmbH is a supplier of computer technology, NVIDIA is one of the world's leading manufacturers of graphic processors (GPUs). These graphic processors, which can also are used in PCs or games computers, are being connected with a network of computer processors to form a GPU cluster. A total of 400 GPUs are being installed. This allows to reach a cumulative peak performance of about 500 Teraflops. This is equivalent to about 10,000 normal PCs. One particular feature of the new computer is its comparatively low power consumption. It is 50 times smaller than a system with the same computing capability composed of PCs.

Edwin Laermann, Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bielefeld University is expecting great opportunities from the new supercomputer: 'We are excited about the new possibilities the GPU cluster will bring to research on strongly interacting hot and dense matter at Bielefeld University'. Laermann is a member of the 'lattice gauge theory' research group that will be working with the new supercomputer. Dr. Olaf Kaczmarek reports that this high-performance computer builds on more than 15 years of experience acquired in Bielefeld in the use of special computers for quantum chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions between quarks and gluons. 'We are pleased with the successful cooperation with the QCD support team at NVIDIA, who are providing technological support for the new high-performance computer, and the American research colleagues in the USQCD consortium who are using similar hardware architectures for their research on strong interaction physics', says Frithjof Karsch, Professor at Bielefeld University and Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA.

Research on strongly interacting matter is part of the Theoretical Sciences research profile at Bielefeld University, a cooperation between mathematics, theoretical physics, and mathematical economics. 

For further information in the Internet, go to:
www2.physik.uni-bielefeld.de/lattice.html

Contact:
Dr. Olaf Kaczmarek, Bielefeld University
Faculty of Physics
Telephone: 0521 / 106- 6212
Email: okacz@physik.uni-bielefeld.de