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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

What a strange article. I am not a physicist but I know pop-culture QED/QCD (Feynman) and this article strikes me as: A) A load of bullshit buzzwords B) Title gore, should be just "Simulating QCD on a custom computer" or simply "Simulating QCD" C) They're trying to get some government funding or worse - VC funding.

Please prove me wrong.

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Lattice QCD is something legitimate that people have been working on since the 80s. Some of the earliest massively parallel machines like the Connection Machine were thought to be useful for it. It’s totally plausible that physicists were crazy enough to build a custom Supercomputer for it. They routinely build complex custom ASICs for particle detectors. Note also the time (2004) nowadays they use GPUs for lattice QCD.

People (the same people, actually) were building (not-so-)custom supercomputers for QCD (and other tasks) in the 80s:

https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/1989/02/epn...

It seems like they want to emphasize how they designed hardware to do that simulation.

I wouldn't call it bullshit buzzwords, but "quantum chromodynamics on a chip" brings to mind some godawful cross of a quantum computer and a particle accelerator.

Otoh, the title appears to be a faithful to the computer's name.

Seems like it’s just computing history write-ups, looking through the EPCC post history.

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