The Quest for Light Sea Quarks: Algorithms for the Future

The past six years have witnessed a number of large simulations of full QCD with two degenerate sea quarks and Wilson like actions. All of them were based on the hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm (HMC) which has been systematically improved over the years. These simulations, however, albeit being milestones for lattice QCD in the pre-Teracomputing age [1], suffer from severe restrictions that prevent them to be truly realistic: we need to go to lighter quark masses and operate with three flavors with masses eventually approaching the physical mass. This situation has been motivating research and development of alternative algorithms of the multibosonic variety (MBA) that promise in principle to overcome some of the restrictions of HMC mentioned. It has been shown that MBA can indeed be geared to reach the efficiency of HMC [2] and encouraging results have been achieved with MBA for the treatment of finite density QCD [3], supersymmetric field theories [4] as well as the case of three dynamical fermion flavors [5]. In this contribution we wish to describe our benchmarking of MBA, performed in the quest to achieve lighter quark masses than previously