Mission statement

Quantum field theories play a central role in describing phenomena from elementary particle physics to solid state physics, as well as in models of neuronal systems. In the vast majority of cases, the complexity and sometimes non-linearity of the theories and models make simulations the only promising means for predicting experimental outcomes or material properties. Such simulations not only represent important applications on the HPC systems installed and planned at JSC. Rather, they are often the most demanding calculations that fully utilize the systems in terms of parallelism and the performance of the individual computing nodes. Simulations in numerical field theory face a threefold challenge:

• the increasing complexity of the hardware makes porting of existing and developing new efficient software significantly harder and more complex,
• the advancing frontier of target observables increase e.g. the complexity of the operators that need to be implemented or require new methods to be developed, and
• the standard methods have advanced significantly, e.g. from simple linear solvers like e.g. BiCGstab to involved multi-grid algorithms.

These challenges imply a new level of complication in the development and use of HPC systems at the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and any HPC system worldwide. Consequently, significant effort is required in order to enable efficient simulations in the future. Such efforts pay off in multiple ways. Firstly, they enable the scientific community to perform simulations essential for their scientific needs. Secondly, they provide excellent feedback on the architectures that can be used in a co-design effort to improve their effectiveness for these applications and, due to similarities in the models or methods, also for a broader range of users. This is particularly relevant for those architectures, such as the Modular Supercomputer Architecture (MSA) or the European Processor Initiative (EPI), which FZJ is actively developing or where it collaborates in the design effort.

It is the task of the Simulation and Data Laboratory Numerical Quantum Field Theory to tackle these issues. Following the Simulation and Data Science Laboratory (SDL) idea, the SDL will provide efficient software, engage in the co-design efforts, disseminate the lessons learned in workshops or hackathons, while keeping up-to-date on the needs and developments in the communities through collaborative research.