QCD Thermodynamics with Almost Realistic Quark Masses

Ongoing calculations on the QCDOC supercomputer at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the APEnext installation at the University of Bielefeld aim to determine the critical temperature of the QCD phase transition as well as the equation of state with almost realistic quark masses. We will discuss preliminary results of the quark mass and cut-off dependence of order parameters, susceptibilities, static quark potentials and the critical temperature in (2+1)-flavor QCD. All these quantities are of immediate interest for heavy ion phenomenology