QPACE -- a QCD parallel computer based on Cell processors

Dirk Pleiter
DESY / NIC

QPACE is a novel parallel computer which has been developed to
be primarily used for lattice QCD simulations. The compute power
is provided by the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor, an enhanced version
of the Cell processor which is used in the Playstation 3. The QPACE
nodes are interconnected by a custom, application optimized
3-dimensional torus network implemented on an FPGA. To achieve the
very high packaging density of 26 TFlops per rack a new water
cooling concept has been developed and successfully realized.
8 QPACE racks have been deployed at the research centre Jülich and
the university of Wuppertal providing an aggregate performance of
about 200 TFlops. The QPACE team consists of researchers and
engineers from the universities Regensburg, Wuppertal, Ferrara,
Milano, the research centres DESY and Jülich as well as the IBM
labs Böblingen, Rochester and La Gaude.