Practical Implementation of Lattice QCD Simulation on SIMD Machines with Intel AVX-512

Abstract

We investigate implementation of lattice Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) code on the Intel AVX-512 architecture. The most time consuming part of the numerical simulations of lattice QCD is a solver of linear equation for a large sparse matrix that represents the strong interaction among quarks. To establish widely applicable prescriptions, we examine rather general methods for the SIMD architecture of AVX-512, such as using intrinsics and manual prefetching, for the matrix multiplication. Based on experience on the Oakforest-PACS system, a large scale cluster composed of Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing, we discuss the performance tuning exploiting AVX-512 and code design on the SIMD architecture and massively parallel machines. We observe that the same code runs efficiently on an Intel Xeon Skylake-SP machine.