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Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation

Quantum Electrodynamics Coupled-Cluster at Scale: High-Performance Implementation for Complex Systems

Nicholas P. Bauman, Himadri Pathak, Marcus D. Liebenthal, Ajay Panyala, Daniel Mejı́a-Rodrı́guez, Niranjan Govind, Karol Kowalski

Published Dec 15, 2025• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Coupled-cluster theory (CC) is a highly accurate and versatile method for simulating complex interactions within quantum systems. The extension of CC theory to model mixed electron-photon processes with quantum electrodynamics (QED) has improved our capability to predict cavity-modified chemistry, a field where photons are used as cost-effective and eco-friendly alternatives to catalyze/inhibit chemical reactions. However, calculations with CC methods, even without incorporating QED effects, are often prohibitively expensive. Simulations of larger systems require scalable infrastructures that exist for traditional CC methods but not for QED-CC methods. As such, we present a GPU-enabled, high-performance, open-source implementation of the quantum electrodynamics coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (QED-CCSD) within the ExaChem quantum chemistry software package. ExaChem relies on the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure: a parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed to achieve scalable performance on modern heterogeneous supercomputing platforms. We discuss theoretical foundations, algorithmic details, and numerical benchmarks to showcase the larger systems that ExaChem can simulate and how the integration of photonic degrees-of-freedom alters their ground-state properties.

DOI
10.1021/acs.jctc.5c01599

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Coupled-cluster theory (CC) is a highly accurate and versatile method for simulating complex interactions within quantum systems. The extension of CC theory to model mixed electron-photon processes with quantum electrodynamics (QED) has improved our capability to predict cavity-modified chemistry, a field where photons are used as cost-effective and eco-friendly alternatives to catalyze/inhibit chemical reactions. However, calculations with CC methods, even without incorporating QED effects, are often prohibitively expensive. Simulations of larger systems require scalable infrastructures that exist for traditional CC methods but not for QED-CC methods. As such, we present a GPU-enabled, high-performance, open-source implementation of the quantum electrodynamics coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (QED-CCSD) within the ExaChem quantum chemistry software package. ExaChem relies on the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure: a parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed to achieve scalable performance on modern heterogeneous supercomputing platforms. We discuss theoretical foundations, algorithmic details, and numerical benchmarks to showcase the larger systems that ExaChem can simulate and how the integration of photonic degrees-of-freedom alters their ground-state properties.
We present our successful implementation of the quantum electrodynamics coupled-cluster method with single and double excitations (QED-CCSD) for electronic and bosonic amplitudes, covering both individual and mixed excitation processes within the ExaChem program package, which relies on the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure. TAMM is a parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed for utilizing modern computing platforms, from laptops to leadership-class computing resources. This developed computational framework extends the traditional CCSD method to incorporate the intricate interplay between electronic and bosonic degrees of freedom, providing a comprehensive description of quantum phenomena. We discuss theoretical foundations, algorithmic details, and numerical benchmarks to demonstrate how the integration of bosonic degrees of freedom alters the electronic ground state. The interactions between electrons and photons within an optical cavity are modeled using the Pauli-Fierz Hamiltonian within the dipole approximation in the length gauge. The integration of QED effects within the CCSD framework contributes to a more accurate and versatile model for simulating complex quantum systems, thereby opening avenues for a better understanding, prediction, and manipulation of various physical phenomena.
The workhorse method of computational materials science is undeniably density functional theory in the Kohn-Sham framework of approximate exchange and correlation energy functionals. However, the need for highly accurate predictions of ground and excited state properties in materials science motivates the further development and exploration of alternative as well as complementary techniques. Among these alternative approaches, quantum chemical wavefunction based theories and in particular coupled cluster theory hold the promise to fill a gap in the toolbox of computational materials scientists. Coupled cluster (CC) theory provides a compelling framework of approximate infinite-order perturbation theory in the form of an exponential of cluster operators describing the true quantum many-body effects of the electronic wave function at a computational cost that, despite being significantly more expensive than DFT, scales polynomially with system size. The hierarchy of size-extensive approximate methods established in the framework of CC theory achieves systematic improvability for many materials properties. This is in contrast to currently available density functionals that often suffer from uncontrolled approximations that limit the accuracy in the prediction of materials properties. In this tutorial-style review we will introduce basic concepts of coupled cluster theory and recent developments that increase its computational efficiency for calculations of molecules, solids and materials in general. We will touch upon the connection between coupled cluster theory and the random-phase approximation to bridge the gap between traditional quantum chemistry and many-body Green’s function theories that are widely-used in the field of solid state physics. We will discuss various approaches to improve the computational performance without compromising accuracy. These approaches include large-scale parallel design as well as techniques that reduce the prefactor of the computational complexity. A central part of this article discusses the convergence of calculated properties to the thermodynamic limit which is of significant importance for reliable predictions of materials properties and constitutes an additional challenge compared to calculations of large molecules. Furthermore we mention technical aspects of computer code implementations of periodic coupled cluster theories in different numerical frameworks of the one-electron orbital basis; the projector-augmented-wave formalism using a plane wave basis set and the numeric atom-centered-orbital with resolution-of-identity.
2020, 152, 174113] within the Tensor Algebra for Many-body Methods (TAMM) infrastructure. TAMM is a massively parallel heterogeneous tensor library designed for utilizing forthcoming exascale computing resources. The two-body electron repulsion matrix elements are Cholesky-decomposed, and we imposed spin-explicit forms of the various operators when evaluating the tensor contractions. Unlike our previous real algebra Tensor Contraction Engine (TCE) implementation, the TAMM implementation supports fully complex algebra. The RT-EOM-CC singles (S) and doubles (D) time-dependent amplitudes are propagated using a first-order Adams-Moulton method. This new implementation shows excellent scalability tested up to 500 GPUs using the Zn-porphyrin molecule with 655 basis functions, with parallel efficiencies above 90% up to 400 GPUs. The TAMM RT-EOM-CCSD was used to study core photoemission spectra in the formaldehyde and ethyl trifluoroacetate (ESCA) molecules. Simulations of the latter involve as many as 71 occupied and 649 virtual orbitals. The relative quasiparticle ionization energies and overall spectral functions agree well with available experimental results.
Heterogeneous nodes composed of a multicore CPU and at least one graphics processing unit (GPU) are increasingly common in high-performance scientific computing, and significant programming effort is currently being undertaken to port existing scientific algorithms to these unique architectures. We present implementations for two many-body quantum chemistry methods on heterogeneous nodes: the coupled-cluster with single and double excitations (CCSD) and time-dependent configuration interaction with single and double excitations (TD-CISD) methods. Both methods can be implemented on a computer as a series of dense matrix-matrix multiplications, operations that GPUs are particularly adept at performing. The GPU-accelerated CCSD algorithm is as much as 4.3 times faster than the corresponding CPU algorithm and 9.7 times faster than the algorithm in the Molpro package. The TD-CISD algorithm is accelerated by as much as a factor of 3.9 by GPUs. Enhanced performance is achieved by overlapping CPU and GPU computations.
In the field of polaritonic chemistry, strong light-matter interactions are used to alter chemical reactions inside optical cavities. To understand these processes, the development of reliable theoretical models is essential. While traditional methods have to balance accuracy and system size, new developments in quantum computing offer a path for accurate calculations on currently available quantum devices. Here, we introduce the quantum electrodynamics unitary coupled cluster (QED-UCC) method combined with the Variational Quantum Eigensolver algorithm, as well as the quantum electrodynamics equation-of-motion (QED-EOM) method formulated in the qubit basis that allow accurate calculations of ground-state and excited-state properties of strongly coupled light-matter systems suitable for quantum computers. These methods show excellent agreement with the exact reference results and can outperform their traditional counterparts when strong electronic correlations become significant. This work sets the stage for future developments of polaritonic quantum chemistry methods suitable for both classical and quantum computers.
Efficient scalable implementations are presented for two single-reference coupled-cluster (CC) methods with non-iterative corrections for triple excitations, which accurately describe single bond dissociations in molecules in contrast to the standard CCSD(T) approach. These methods are (a) the completely renormalized coupled-cluster theory, CR-CC(2,3), and (b) the ΛCCSD(T) approach, the triples energy corrections in both of which are formulated using the left eigenvector of the CC similarity transformed Hamiltonian. The density fitting approximation is employed for factorizing the two-electron repulsion integrals (ERIs), which eliminates memory bottlenecks associated with the storage of the four-index ERIs by allowing an integral-direct algorithm. Massively parallel algorithms have been developed for the above methods within the GAMESS quantum chemistry program using a hybrid MPI and OpenMP based parallelization model. All compute-intensive steps in the CCSD amplitude and the left eigenvector equations, as well as the triples corrections in both methods, have been adapted to execute on graphical processing units (GPUs) using the OpenMP target directives. Performance of these codes is demonstrated on petascale supercomputers equipped with NVIDIA A100 GPUs. While the CR-CC(2,3) and ΛCCSD(T) computations take roughly twice as much time as the standard CCSD(T) method, the GPU-offloaded codes are shown to impart 3.5-5× accelerations relative to the CPU-only parallel codes, thereby significantly reducing the time-to-solution for the CR-CC(2,3) and ΛCCSD(T) methods.