Towards Highly Scalable Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics (AIMD) Simulations on the Intel Knights Landing Manycore Processor
The Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics (AIMD) method allows scientists to treat the dynamics of molecular and condensed phase systems while retaining a first-principles-based description of their interactions. This extremely important method has tremendous computational requirements, because the electronic Schr¨odinger equation, approximated using Kohn-Sham Density Functional Theory (DFT), is solved at every time step. With the advent of manycore architectures, application developers have a significant amount of processing power within each compute node that can only be exploited through massive parallelism. A compute intensive application such as AIMD forms a good candidate to leverage this processing power. In this paper, we focus on adding thread level parallelism to the plane wave DFT methodology implemented in NWChem. Through a careful optimization of tall-skinny matrix products, which are at the heart of the Lagrange multiplier and nonlocal pseudopotential kernels, as well as 3D FFTs, our OpenMP implementation delivers excellent strong scaling on the latest Intel Knights Landing (KNL) processor. We assess the efficiency of our Lagrange multiplier kernels by building a Roofline model of the platform, and verify that our implementation is close to the roofline for various problem sizes. Finally, we present strong scaling results on the complete AIMD simulation for a 64 water molecules test case, that scales up to all 68 cores of the Knights Landing processor.
- Research Organization:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States). Environmental Molecular Sciences Lab. (EMSL)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- OSTI ID:
- 1415094
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-130901; 49691; KC0302060
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: IEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS 2017), May 29-June 2, 2017, Orlando, Florida, 234-243
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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