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The QCDOC, ''Quantum ChromoDynamics On a Chip'', is a supercomputer technology focusing on using relatively cheap low power processing elements to produce a massively parallel machine. As the name suggests, the machine is custom made to solve small but extremely demanding problems in the fields of quantum physics. == Overview == The computers were designed and built jointly by University of Edinburgh (UKQCD), Columbia University, the RIKEN BNL Brookhaven Research Center and IBM.〔(RIKEN BNL Research Center Dedicates New Supercomputer for Physics Research )〕 The purpose of the collaboration was to exploit computing facilities for lattice field theory calculations whose primary aim is to increase the predictive power of the Standard Model of elementary particle interactions through numerical simulation of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). The target was to build a massively parallel supercomputer able to peak at 10 Tflops with sustained power at 50% capacity. There are three QCDOCs in service each reaching 10 Tflops peak operation. * University of Edinburgh's Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC). In operation by the UKQCD since 2005 * RIKEN BNL Brookhaven Research Center at Brookhaven National Laboratory * U.S. Department of Energy Program in High Energy and Nuclear Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory Around 23 UK academic staff, their postdocs and students, from seven universities, belong to UKQCD. Costs were funded through a Joint Infrastructure Fund Award of £6.6 million. Staff costs (system support, physicist programmers and postdocs) are around £1 million per year, other computing and operating costs are around £0.2 million per year.〔http://www.scitech.ac.uk/roadmap/rmProject.aspx?q=82〕 QCDOC was to replace an earlier design, QCDSP, where the power came from connecting large amounts of DSPs together in a similar fashion. The QCDSP strapped 12.288 nodes to a 4D network and reached 1 Tflops in 1998. QCDOC can be seen as a predecessor to the highly successful Blue Gene/L supercomputer. They share a lot of design traits, and similarities go beyond superficial characteristics. Blue Gene is also a massively parallel supercomputer built with a large amount of cheap, relatively weak PowerPC 440 based SoC nodes connected with a high bandwidth multidimensional mesh. They differ, however, in that the computing nodes in BG/L are more powerful and are connected with a faster, more sophisticated network that scales up to several hundred thousand nodes per system. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「QCDOC」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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