The award for the Swansea Lattice Field Theory Group is part of a wider £7.3million award to the eight-university UK Quantum Chromodynamics (UKQCD) Collaboration – comprising Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Oxford, Plymouth, Southampton, and Swansea Universities – led by Swansea's Professor Simon Hands as the Principal Investigator.
The UKQCD Collaboration uses these powerful computers to study Quantum Chromodynamics, which is the fundamental theory of the interactions between particles called quarks and gluons, in order to understand the structure and stability of protons and neutrons, and to understand why quarks are never seen in isolation.
The High Performance computers also facilitate the analysis and interpretation of particle collision experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN – the European Organisation for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland.
They will allow physicists to determine the behaviour and properties of matter at extremes of temperature and density, such as found in the first instants after the Big Bang, or at the core of a neutron star.
Professor Simon Hands of Swansea's Lattice Field Theory Group and the UKQCD Collaboration's Principal Investigator said: "UKQCD has been a world-leading collaboration of scientists studying such questions since 1990, and has consistently enjoyed access to some of the world's most powerful computers during this time. Swansea became a member in 1993 and now has one of the largest and best Lattice Field Theory groups in the UK.
"The research carried out by the group in Swansea is strongly motivated by the experimental program started last year at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, and by the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Germany.
"We specialise in numerical studies of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of high temperature or density, which will be experimentally probed by the LHC and FAIR experiments, and in the study of fundamental physics beyond the Standard Model for which worldwide attention has turned to the LHC.
"As a result of this significant funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, our current project will proceed in two stages. The first development will be the acquisition of a computer capable of performing roughly 30 trillion flop/s (operations per second), followed by the installation of an even more powerful machine, developed in collaboration with a major computer company, capable of 800 trillion flop/s, in mid-2011."
For more information on the work of Swansea University's Physics Department visit www.swansea.ac.uk/physics/, and the UKQCD Collaboration visit http://ukqcd.epcc.ed.ac.uk/.