Solving Low Energy QCD with Chiral Symmetry and Petaflops

Norman H. Christ

Columbia University

The fastest high-performance computers and increasingly ingenious algorithms have been applied to describe the interactions of the quarks and gluons, the constituents of the atomic nucleus and the building blocks for all of strong interactions physics. While this activity has been vigorously pursued for nearly 30 years, it is only recently that a sufficiently faithful treatment of the chiral symmetry of QCD and sufficiently powerful computers are permitting accurate calculations with reasonable control of all sources of errors. I will illustrate this situation with current calculations of the RBC-UKQCD collaboration and describe the substantial advances to be expected in the near future