Seminar: Simulating the Strong Force Using Large-scale High Performance Computing: State-of-the-art and Future Directions via Machine Learning

Our understanding of the fundamental building blocks of our world is described by the Standard Model of physics, which formulates the interaction between fundamental particles like quarks, gluons, electrons or photons. Quarks and gluons, interacting via the strong force, form stable particles, so-called protons and neutrons, which form the nuclei of all atoms. Only by using the largest supercomputers can the strong interaction, represented by lattice Quantum Chromodynamics, between quarks and gluons be realistically simulated.

 

The talk will give an overview of cutting-edge Monte Carlo simulations, focusing on those carried out by our group as part of the Extended Twisted Mass collaboration. We will discuss our major algorithmic developments, which are enabling precisions that can connect to tests of the Standard Model. Moreover, we will address challenges arising from critical slowing down within Monte Carlo simulations and discuss the potential of novel approaches based on machine trainable generative models to overcome this challenge.

Dr. Jacob Finkenrath is a Computational Scientist at the Computation-based Science and Technology Research Center (CaSToRC) at the Cyprus Institute (CyI), currently holding a position as a Research Scientist. He leads the High Level Support Team (HLST) for academic projects of the National Competence Centre in High Performance Computing of Cyprus, which is being implemented within the EuroHPC-JU project EuroCC.

 

He received his PhD at the University of Wuppertal in 2015 in theoretical particle physics on stochastic methods for the calculation of the fermion determinant. Since 2015 he works at CaSToRC as a Computational Scientist and is a member of the Extended Twisted Mass collaboration.  Within this collaboration he leads the simulation effort by tuning and generating cutting-edge lattice Quantum Chromodynamics gauge ensembles at physical light, strange and charm quark masses. These large scale Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulations utilize large computer time allocations on HPC systems around the world, like SuperMUC (LRZ, Germany), Hawk (HLRS, Germany) and Frontera (TACC, US).