Lattice QCD with Commodity Hardware and Software

Large scale QCD Monte Carlo calculations have typically been performed on either commercial supercomputers or specially built massively parallel computers such as Fermilab’s ACPMAPS. Commodity computer systems offer impressive floating point performance-tocost ratios which exceed those of commercial supercomputers. As high performance networking components approach commodity pricing, it becomes reasonable to assemble a massively parallel supercomputer from commodity parts. We describe the work and progress to date of a collaboration working on this problem.