Software Development for UKQCD

The strong interactions of quarks and gluons appear to result in their permanent confinement into bound states called hadrons, such as the proton and pion, and to be described by a quantum field theory called QCD. Experimental measurements seeking to determine the properties of quarks and gluons must, instead, be carried out on hadrons and related to them by theoretical calculations in QCD. The complexity of QCD demands its simulation using the highest performance computers, often developed specially for the purpose. This large-scale computational effort is typically carried out by international collaborations who are developing open-source community codes that run efficiently on a range of computing platforms for this work. The UKQCD Collaboration has united UK research in this field since 1989 and is one of the leading groups world-wide. In addition to its diverse physics programme, UKQCD has contributed to the development of world-leading hardware, software and data management tools. This proposal will enhance the functionality and performance of an international community code base to enable it to run efficiently on new multi-core processors, and to extend the range of physics that can be simulated to include the charm quark, systems at non-zero density and new theories of physics at a more fundamental scale, signals of which might be discovered at the Large Hadron Collider.