Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Performance Modeling of Vectorized SNAP Inter-Atomic Potentials on CPU Architectures.

Technical Report ·
DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1564037· OSTI ID:1564037
 [1];  [2]
  1. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States); Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
  2. Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)

SNAP potentials are inter-atomic potentials for molecular dynamics that enable simulations at accuracy levels comparable to density functional theory(DFT) at a fraction of the cost. As such, SNAP scales to on the order of 104 — 106 atoms. In this work, we explore CPU optimization of potentials computation using SIMD. We note that efficient use of SIMD is non-obvious as the application features an irregular iteration space for various potential terms, necessitating use of SIMD across atoms in a cross matrix, batched fashion. We present a preliminary analytic model to determine the correct batch size for several CPU architectures across several vendors, and show end-to-end speedups between 1.66x and 3.22x compared to the original.

Research Organization:
Sandia National Lab. (SNL-NM), Albuquerque, NM (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)
DOE Contract Number:
AC04-94AL85000; NA0003525
OSTI ID:
1564037
Report Number(s):
SAND-2019-10915R; 679419
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English