Collaborative Research: Human Resources for Computational High Energy Physics

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This is a group project in computational high energy physics being carried out by physicsts at the University of Arizona, University of California, Santa Barbara, University of Utah, and the American Physical Society. Postdoctoral research associates are trained in software development and algorithms needed to effectively use the teraflop and even petaflop scale computers that are now or will be made available to working scientists. The very large-scale numerical calculations that are required are widely recognized as one of the grand challenges of computational science. Specifically, the following new initiatives will be launched: (1) a new, highly improved algorithm for treating light quarks, which will significantly improve the precision of these calculations, (2) a new, accurate determination of the strange quark mass, (3) the development of an improved algorithm for treating heavy quarks, and (4) a high-precision determination of the energy levels of bound states of a charm quark and an anticharm quark.This research addresses fundamental questions in high energy and nuclear physics, such as finding fundamental parameters like the masses of the quarks, or the behavior of strong interactions at extreme temperatures such as those found in heavy ion collisons or in the very early universe. This work is directly related to major experimental programs in high energy and nuclear physics including RHIC at Brookhaven, experiments at Jefferson Laboratory, and at the large hadron collider. The codes developed by this program are publicly available and are used by several other groups worldwide. Some of the codes and algorithms developed, such as those for solving very large systems of equations, may be applied in other large scientific simulations. Postdoctoral research associates in this project develop skills in large-scale massively parallel computations and state-of-the-art statistical analysis of data.