Quantum Monte Carlo on a Lattice

Alejandro Muramatsu

Kousuke Nakano, Sandro Sorella, Michele Casula

Ab initio quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) is a stochastic approach for solving the many-body Schrödinger equation without resorting to one-body approximations. QMC algorithms are readily parallelizable via ensembles of Nw walkers, making them well suited to large-scale high-performance computing. Among the QMC techniques, diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC) is widely regarded as the most reliable since it provides the projection onto the ground state of a given Hamiltonian under the fixed-node approximation. One practical realization of DMC is the lattice regularized diffusion Monte Carlo (LRDMC) method, which discretizes the Hamiltonian within the Green's function Monte Carlo framework. DMC methods-including LRDMC-employ the so-called branching technique to stabilize walker weights and populations. At the branching step, walkers must be synchronized globally; any imbalance in per-walker workload can leave central processing unit (CPU) or graphics processing unit (GPU) cores idle, thereby degrading overall hardware utilization. The conventional LRDMC algorithm intrinsically suffers from such load imbalance, which grows as log(Nw), rendering it less efficient on modern parallel architectures. In this work, we present an LRDMC algorithm that inherently addresses the load imbalance issue and achieves significantly improved weak-scaling parallel efficiency. Using the binding energy calculation of a water-methane complex as a test case, we demonstrated that the conventional and load-balanced LRDMC algorithms yield consistent results. Furthermore, by utilizing the Leonardo supercomputer equipped with NVIDIA A100 GPUs, we demonstrated that the load-balanced LRDMC algorithm can maintain extremely high parallel efficiency (∼98%) up to 512 GPUs (corresponding to Nw = 51 200), together with a speedup of ×1.24 if directly compared with the conventional LRDMC algorithm with the same number of walkers. The speedup stays sizable, i.e., × 1.18, even if the number of walkers is reduced to Nw = 400.

Matthew Clifford Wilson

Mauro Iazzi, Matthias Troyer

Efficient continuous-time quantum Monte Carlo (CT-QMC) algorithms that do not suffer from time discretization errors have become the state of the art for most discrete quantum models. They have not been widely used yet for fermionic quantum lattice models, such as the Hubbard model, nor other fermionic lattice systems due to a suboptimal scaling of $O({\ensuremath{\beta}}^{3})$ with inverse temperature $\ensuremath{\beta}$, compared to the linear scaling of discrete-time algorithms. Here we present a CT-QMC algorithm for fermionic lattice systems that matches the scaling of discrete-time methods but is more efficient and free of time discretization errors. This provides an efficient simulation scheme that is free from the systematic errors opening an avenue to more precise studies of large systems at low and zero temperature.

Malvin H. Kalos, G.A. Mikhailov

Jared Sutton, Matthew S. Block

Until now, our Quantum Monte Carlo simulation could only be applied to several lattices in two dimensions.During this project, I adapted our program to be compatible with the three-dimensional Pyrochlore lattice.