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The computation of many correlation functions in lattice QCD is severely hindered by a signal-to-noise problem. Recent developments in the factorization of both the fermion propagator and determinant pave the way for the implementation of multi-level Monte Carlo integration techniques for lattice QCD. In these proceedings we introduce new strategies for the estimation of the factorized contribution to the connected and disconnected diagrams for meson two-point functions. An estimator for the factorized connected diagram is constructed sequentially for a two-level integration scheme. For the disconnected diagram, we introduce an improved estimator by performing a frequency-splitting of traces, applicable with or without multi-level integration. Preliminary results in the quenched theory with a two-level integration scheme are presented., Comment: 1+13 pages, 5 figures, presented at the 36th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2018), 22-28 July 2018, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

In calculating hadronic contributions to precision observables for tests of the Standard Model in lattice QCD, the electromagnetic current plays a central role. Using a Wilson action with O($a$) improvement in QCD with $N_{\mathrm{f}}$ flavors, a counterterm must be added to the vector current in order for its on-shell matrix elements to be O($a$) improved. In addition, the local vector current, which has support on one lattice site, must be renormalized. At O($a$), the breaking of the SU($N_{\mathrm{f}}$) symmetry by the quark mass matrix leads to a mixing between the local currents of different quark flavors. We present a non-perturbative calculation of all the required improvement and renormalization constants needed for the local and the conserved electromagnetic current in QCD with $N_{\mathrm{f}}=2+1$ O($a$)-improved Wilson fermions and tree-level Symanzik improved gauge action, with the exception of one coefficient, which we show to be order $g_0^6$ in lattice perturbation theory. The method is based on the vector and axial Ward identities imposed at finite lattice spacing and in the chiral limit. We make use of lattice ensembles generated as part of the Coordinated Lattice Simulations (CLS) initiative., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures. Few typos corrected. Updated to match the published version

We present a nucleon structure analysis including local isovector charges as well as twist-2 operator insertions. Computations are performed on CLS ensembles with $N_f=2+1$ Wilson fermions, covering four values of the lattice spacing and pion masses down to $M_\pi \approx 200\,\mathrm{MeV}$. Several source-sink separations (typically $\sim 1.0\,\mathrm{fm}$ to $\sim 1.5\,\mathrm{fm}$) allow us to assess excited-state contaminations. Results on each ensemble are obtained from simultaneous two-state fits including all observables and all available source-sink separations with the mass gap as a free fit parameter. Finally, the chiral, continuum and finite size extrapolation is performed to extract physical results., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, 1 table. Talk presented at the 36th Annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 22-28 July 2018, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA

This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of performance trade offs between implementation choices for transaction runtime systems on persistent memory. We compare three implementations of transaction runtimes: undo logging, redo logging, and copy-on-write. We also present a memory allocator that plugs into these runtimes. Our microbenchmark based evaluation focuses on understanding the interplay between various factors that contribute to performance differences between the three runtimes -- read/write access patterns of workloads, size of the persistence domain (portion of the memory hierarchy where the data is effectively persistent), cache locality, and transaction runtime bookkeeping overheads. No single runtime emerges as a clear winner. We confirm our analysis in more realistic settings of three "real world" applications we developed with our transactional API: (i) a key-value store we implemented from scratch, (ii) a SQLite port, and (iii) a persistified version of memcached, a popular key-value store. These findings are not only consistent with our microbenchmark analysis, but also provide additional interesting insights into other factors (e.g. effects of multithreading and synchronization) that affect application performance.

We report on an analysis of the average quark momentum fraction of the nucleon and related quantities using $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ Wilson fermions. Computations are performed on four CLS ensembles covering three values of the lattice spacing at pion masses down to $M_\pi \approx 200\,\mathrm{MeV}$. Several source-sink separations ($\sim 1.0\,\mathrm{fm}$ to $\sim 1.4\,\mathrm{fm}$) are used to assess the excited-state contamination. To gain further insight, the generalized pencil-of-functions approach has been implemented to reduce the excited-state contamination in the relevant two- and three-point functions. Preliminary results are shown for the isovector nucleon charges from vector, axial vector and tensor derivative (twist-2) operators., Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables. Talk presented at the 35th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 18-24 June 2017, Granada, Spain

We estimate the production rate of photons by the quark-gluon plasma in lattice QCD. We propose a new correlation function which provides better control over the systematic uncertainty in estimating the photon production rate at photon momenta in the range {\pi}T/2 to 2{\pi}T. The relevant Euclidean vector current correlation functions are computed with $N_{\mathrm f}$ = 2 Wilson clover fermions in the chirally-symmetric phase. In order to estimate the photon rate, an ill-posed problem for the vector-channel spectral function must be regularized. We use both a direct model for the spectral function and a model-independent estimate from the Backus-Gilbert method to give an estimate for the photon rate., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, talk presented at 35th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 18-24 June 2017, Granada, Spain

We present updated results on the nucleon electromagnetic form factors and axial coupling calculated using CLS ensembles with $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ dynamical flavours of Wilson fermions. The measurements are performed on large, fine lattices with a pseudoscalar mass reaching down to 200 MeV. The truncated-solver method is employed to reduce the variance of the measurements. Estimation of the matrix elements is challenging due to large contamination from excited states and further investigation is necessary to bring these effects under control., Comment: corrected reference; 7 pages, 4 figures, talk presented at 34th annual International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, 24-30 July 2016, University of Southampton, UK

The Generalized Eigenvalue Problem (GEVP) has been used extensively in the past in order to reliably extract energy levels from time-dependent Euclidean correlators calculated in Lattice QCD. We propose a formulation of the GEVP in frequency space. Our approach consists of applying the model-independent Backus-Gilbert method to a set of Euclidean two-point functions with common quantum numbers. A GEVP analysis in frequency space is then applied to a matrix of estimators that allows us, among other things, to obtain particular linear combinations of the initial set of operators that optimally overlap to different local regions in frequency. We apply this method to lattice data from NRQCD. This approach can be interesting both for vacuum physics as well as for finite-temperature problems., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, talk presented at the 34th International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2016), 24 - 30 July 2016, University of Southampton, UK

The common wisdom is that distributed transactions do not scale. But what if distributed transactions could be made scalable using the next generation of networks and a redesign of distributed databases? There would be no need for developers anymore to worry about co-partitioning schemes to achieve decent performance. Application development would become easier as data placement would no longer determine how scalable an application is. Hardware provisioning would be simplified as the system administrator can expect a linear scale-out when adding more machines rather than some complex sub-linear function, which is highly application specific. In this paper, we present the design of our novel scalable database system NAM-DB and show that distributed transactions with the very common Snapshot Isolation guarantee can indeed scale using the next generation of RDMA-enabled network technology without any inherent bottlenecks. Our experiments with the TPC-C benchmark show that our system scales linearly to over 6.5 million new-order (14.5 million total) distributed transactions per second on 56 machines., Comment: 12 pages

We present preliminary results on the electromagnetic form factors and axial charge of the nucleon from ensembles generated by the CLS effort with $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ flavours of non-perturbatively $\mathrm{O}(a)$-improved Wilson fermions and open temporal boundary conditions. Systematic effects due to excited-state contamination are accounted for using both two-state fits and the method of summed operator insertions. This exploratory analysis demonstrates the viability of obtaining precision baryon observables with $N_\mathrm{f}=2+1$ flavours of Wilson fermions on fine lattices, aiming towards controlled chiral and continuum limits in the future., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; contribution to the proceedings of the 33rd International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory, July 14-18, 2015, Kobe, Japan

Many observables of interest in lattice QCD are extracted from correlation functions involving the vector current. If Wilson fermions are used, it is therefore of practical importance that, besides the action, the current be O($a$) improved in order to remove the leading discretization errors from the observables. Here we introduce and apply a new method to determine the improvement coefficient for the two most widely used discretizations of the current., Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures

The hardware transactional memory (HTM) implementation in Intel's i7-4770 "Haswell" processor tracks the transactional read-set in the L1 (level-1), L2 (level-2) and L3 (level-3) caches and the write-set in the L1 cache. Displacement or eviction of read-set entries from the cache hierarchy or write-set entries from the L1 results in abort. We show that the placement policies of dynamic storage allocators -- such as those found in common "malloc" implementations -- can influence the L1 conflict miss rate in the L1. Conflict misses -- sometimes called mapping misses -- arise because of less than ideal associativity and represent imbalanced distribution of active memory blocks over the set of available L1 indices. Under transactional execution conflict misses may manifest as aborts, representing wasted or futile effort instead of a simple stall as would occur in normal execution mode. Furthermore, when HTM is used for transactional lock elision (TLE), persistent aborts arising from conflict misses can force the offending thread through the so-called "slow path". The slow path is undesirable as the thread must acquire the lock and run the critical section in normal execution mode, precluding the concurrent execution of threads in the "fast path" that monitor that same lock and run their critical sections in transactional mode. For a given lock, multiple threads can concurrently use the transactional fast path, but at most one thread can use the non-transactional slow path at any given time. Threads in the slow path preclude safe concurrent fast path execution. Aborts rising from placement policies and L1 index imbalance can thus result in loss of concurrency and reduced aggregate throughput.

The FASTSUM collaboration has been carrying out simulations of N_f=2+1 QCD at nonzero temperature in the fixed-scale approach using anisotropic lattices. Here we present the status of these studies, including recent results for electrical conductivity and charge diffusion, and heavy quarkonium (charm and beauty) physics., Comment: Talk given at Quark Confinement and the Hadron Spectrum (Confinement XI), 8-12 September, St. Petersburg, Russia. 8 pages, 7 figures

We present results on the bottomonium spectrum at temperatures above and below the deconfinement crossover temperature, $T_c$, from dynamical lattice QCD simulations. The heavy quark is treated with a non-relativistic effective field theory on the lattice and serves as a probe of the hot medium. Ensembles with a finer spatial lattice spacing and a greater range of temperatures below $T_c$ than those previously employed by this collaboration are used. In addition, there are $N_f=2+1$ flavours of Wilson clover quark in the sea with $M_\pi\approx400$ MeV and we perform a more careful tuning of the bottom quark mass in this work. We calculate the spectral functions of S and P wave bottomonium states using the maximum entropy method and confirm earlier findings on the survival of the ground state S wave states up to at least $2T_c$ and the immediate dissociation of the P wave states above $T_c$., Comment: 17 pages, 11 figures

We investigate the modification of S and P wave states in the bottomonium spectrum above and below the deconfinement crossover temperature through their spectral functions obtained from the maximum entropy method. Anisotropic ensembles with $N_f=2+1$ Wilson clover fermions with tadpole-improvement are used while the bottom quark is treated with an improved non-relativistic action. We observe significant modifications of the P wave $\chi_{b1}$ ground state directly above the crossover temperature, $T_c$, while the S wave $\Upsilon$ ground state remains relatively unchanged up to temperatures of almost $2T_c$. This evidence supports earlier conclusions from our FASTSUM collaboration of the immediate dissociation of the P wave states above $T_c$ and the survival of the S wave ground states up to $2T_c$., Comment: presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, Germany

The FASTSUM Collaboration has calculated several quantities relevant for QCD studies at non-zero temperature using the lattice technique. We report here our results for the (i) interquark potential in charmonium; (ii) bottomonium spectral functions; and (iii) electrical conductivity. All results were obtained with 2+1 flavours of dynamical fermions on an anisotropic lattice which allows greater resolution in the temporal direction., Comment: Plenary talk presented at the Strangeness in Quark Matter SQM 2013, Birmingham UK, 21-27 July 2013

The incompatibility of partial d occupation on the perovskite B-site with the standard charge transfer mechanism for ferroelectricity has been a central paradigm in multiferroics research. Nevertheless, it was recently shown by density functional theory calculations that CaMnO_3 exhibits a polar instability that even dominates over the octahedral tilting for slightly enlarged unit cell volume. Here, we present similar calculations for LaCrO_3, which has the same d^3 B-site electron configuration as CaMnO_3. We find that LaCrO_3 exhibits a very similar, albeit much weaker, polar instability as CaMnO_3. In addition, while the Born effective charge (BEC) of the Mn^{4+} cation in CaMnO_3 is highly anomalous, the BEC of Cr^{3+} in LaCrO_3 is only slightly enhanced. By decomposing the BECs into contributions of individual Wannier functions we show that the ferroelectric instabilities in both systems can be understood in terms of charge transfer between TM d and O p states, analogously to the standard d^0 perovskite ferroelectrics., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables