Spin glass simulations on the Janus architecture: A desperate quest for strong scaling

We describe Janus, an application-driven architecture for Monte Carlo simulations of spin glasses. Janus is a massively parallel architecture, based on reconfigurable FPGA nodes; it offers two orders of magnitude better performance than commodity systems for spin glass applications. The first generation Janus machine has been operational since early 2008; we are currently developing a new generation, that will be on line in early 2013. In this paper we present the Janus architecture, describe both implementations and compare their performances with those of commodity systems. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.