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4.3.7 QCD on the Connection Machine

The Connection Machine  Model CM-2 is also very well suited for large scale simulations of QCD. The CM-2 is a distributed-memory, single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD), massively parallel processor comprising up to 65536 () processors [Hillis:85a;87a]. Each processor consists of an arithmetic-logic unit (ALU), or of random-access memory (RAM), and a router interface to perform communications among the processors. There are 16 processors and a router per custom VLSI  chip, with the chips interconnected as a 12-dimensional hypercube. Communications among processors within a chip work essentially like a crossbar interconnect. The router can do general communications, but only local communication is required for QCD, so we use the fast nearest-neighbor communication software called NEWS. The processors deal with one bit at a time. Therefore, the ALU can compute any two Boolean functions as output from three inputs, and all datapaths are one bit wide. In the current version of the Connection Machine (the CM-2), groups of 32 processors (two chips) share a 32-bit (or 64-bit) Weitek floating-point chip, and a transposer chip, which changes 32 bits stored bit-serially within 32 processors into 32 32-bit words for the Weitek, and vice versa.

The high-level languages on the CM, such as *Lisp and CM-Fortran, compile into an assembly language called Parallel Instruction Set (Paris). Paris regards the bit-serial processors as the fundamental units in the machine. However, floating-point computations are not very efficient in the Paris model. This is because in Paris, 32-bit floating-point numbers are stored ``fieldwise''; that is, successive bits of the word are stored at successive memory locations of each processor's memory. However, 32 processors share one Weitek chip, which deals with words stored ``slicewise''-that is, across the processors, one bit in each. Therefore, to do a floating-point operation, Paris loads in the fieldwise operands, transposes them slicewise for the Weitek (using the transposer chip), does the operation, and transposes the slicewise result back to fieldwise for memory storage. Moreover, every operation in Paris is an atomic  process; that is, two operands are brought from memory and one result is stored back to memory, so no use is made of the Weitek registers for intermediate results. Hence, to improve the performance of the Weiteks, a new assembly language called CM Instruction Set (CMIS) has been written, which models the local architectural features much better. In fact, CMIS ignores the bit-serial processors and thinks of the machine in terms of the Weitek chips. Thus, data can be stored slicewise, eliminating all the transposing back and forth. CMIS allows effective use of the Weitek registers, creating a memory hierarchy, which, combined with the internal buses of the Weiteks, offers increased bandwidth  for data motion.

When the arithmetic part of the program is rewritten in CMIS (just as on the Mark IIIfp when it was rewritten in assembly code), the communications become a bottleneck. Therefore, we need also to speed up the communication part of the code. On the CM-2, this is done using the ``bi-directional multi-wire NEWS'' system. As explained above, the CM chips (each containing 16 processors) are interconnected in a 12-dimensional hypercube. However, since there are two CM chips for each Weitek floating-point chip, the floating-point hardware is effectively wired together as an 11-dimensional hypercube, with two wires in each direction. This makes it feasible to do simultaneous communications in both directions of all four space-time directions in QCD-bidirectional multiwire NEWS-thereby reducing the communication time by a factor of eight. Moreover, the data rearrangement necessary to make use of this multiwire NEWS further speeds up the CMIS part of the code by a factor of two.

In 1990-1992, the Connection Machine  was the most powerful commercial QCD machine available: the ``Los Alamos collaboration'' ran full QCD at a sustained rate of on a CM-2 [Brickner:91a]. As was the case for the Mark IIIfp hypercube, in order to obtain this performance, one must resort to writing assembly code for the Weitek chips and for the communication. Our original code, written entirely in the CM-2 version of *Lisp, achieved around [Baillie:89e]. As shown in Table 4.5, this code spends 34 percent of its time doing communication. When we rewrote the most computationally intensive part in the assembly language CMIS, this rose to 54 percent. Then when we also made use of ``multi-wire NEWS'' (to reduce the communication time by a factor of eight), it fell to 30 percent. The Intel Delta and Paragon, as well as Thinking Machines CM-5, passed the CM-2 performance levels in 1993, but here optimization is not yet complete [Gupta:93a].

  
Table 4.5: Fermion Update Time (sec) on Connection Machine for Various Levels of Programming



next up previous contents index
Next: 4.3.8 Status and Prospects Up: 4.3 Quantum Chromodynamics Previous: 4.3.6 QCD on the



Guy Robinson
Wed Mar 1 10:19:35 EST 1995