Education
Columbia University.
physicist university professor
Columbia University.
He is notable for his research in Lattice QCD.
Christ became a professor at Columbia after graduation, and has remained there since. He is also a leading researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Norman"s research lies in the fields of Lattice QCD, which simulates strong interaction among quarks and gluons with monte carlo method.
He worked on various topic in this field, such as the phenomena of quark confinement, the spontaneous chiral magnetization of the vacuum and the quark-gluon plasma.
In recent years, he is mostly interested in the Kaon physics, such as the kaon mass difference, the rare kaon decay and most importantly the direct and indirect Communist Party violation parameter. Lattice QCD is extremely computational intensive.
The simulation is usually performed on the state-of-the-art supercomputer. Instead of purchasing commercial machines, Norman chose to build supercomputers with his colleges at Columbia University.
The lattice group at Columbia pioneered the construction of highly parallel machines dedicated to QCD calculations in 1982, and produced a series of three successful machines between 1985 and 1989 which were used to obtain a variety of new results in QCD. During this period there were also a number of other dedicated computer projects with similar goals carried out in Italy (the APE Project), Japan (QCD-PAX), and Fermilab (American College of Physicians-MAPS) and International Business Machines Corporation (GF11) in the United States
In 1993, Norman started the QCDSP project, aiming to build a Teraflops supercomputer.
The first working hardware was available in August 1995, and a working 6 Gflops machine in July 1996. A 400 Gflops and another 600 Gflops machine are completed in 1998. The computers were designed and built jointly by University of Edinburgh, Columbia University, the Rikagaku Kenkyūsho BNL Brookhaven Research Center and International Business Machines Corporation. The target was to build a massively parallel supercomputer able to peak at 10 Tflops with sustained power at 50% capacity.
At the end of 2005, there were three QCDOCs in service each reaching 10 Tflops peak operation.
QCDOC is considered the precursor of International Business Machines Corporation"s Blue Gene L machine. After QCDOC, although Norman still collaborated closely with International Business Machines Corporation in developing the Blue Gene supercomputers, he was no longer playing a leading role in these projects.