Lattice Studies of Quantum Chromodynamics on a Special Purpose Parallel Processing Machine.

A Monte Carlo study is presented of lattice Quantum Chromo-Dynamics near the deconfining phase transition on lattices of spatial size 16^3, 20 ^3 and 24^3 for N_{t} = 4, 6, 10 and 16. These studies were carried out on a parallel processing machine, designed and built specifically for the calculations. The critical coupling for N_{t} = 16 is determined to be 6.500 +/- 0.036, which agrees with the prediction of perturbative scaling indicating continuum behavior. A broadening of the transition by nearly a factor of three is observed on 24^3 x 6 as compared to 16 ^3 x 4 which is attributed to the decrease in lattice spacing. 24^3 is the largest volume on which these thermodynamics have yet been investigated, and the results are obtained from an order of magnitude greater statistics than have ever been reported in lattice gauge theory calculations.