Evaluating the Coulomb interaction remains a fundamental computational bottleneck in electronic structure theory, dictating the scaling and efficiency of quantum chemical simulations. While recent advancements in graphics processing units (GPUs) offer immense theoretical peak performance, translating traditional, memory-intensive CPU algorithms for evaluating electron repulsion integrals to GPU architectures presents significant challenges due to memory bandwidth limitations and warp divergence. This thesis presents the development of algorithms to efficiently evaluate Coulomb interactions across diverse chemical systems. Chapter 2 describes the GPU implementation of Coulomb interaction for molecular systems at Hartree-Fock level of theory. Chapter 3 shows how multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave algorithm can better utilize GPU compute performance by a two-level parallelization scheme and grid-based screening of orbital pairs in the real space. Chapter 4 illustrates the issues of the original modified Coulomb potential from GFN-xTB in periodic systems, and the effectiveness of a new generalized Ewald summation scheme for the potential in X23 molecular crystal dataset and a range of prototypical bulk semiconductors.
Evaluating the Coulomb interaction remains a fundamental computational bottleneck in electronic structure theory, dictating the scaling and efficiency of quantum chemical simulations. While recent advancements in graphics processing units (GPUs) offer immense theoretical peak performance, translating traditional, memory-intensive CPU algorithms for evaluating electron repulsion integrals to GPU architectures presents significant challenges due to memory bandwidth limitations and warp divergence. This thesis presents the development of algorithms to efficiently evaluate Coulomb interactions across diverse chemical systems. Chapter 2 describes the GPU implementation of Coulomb interaction for molecular systems at Hartree-Fock level of theory. Chapter 3 shows how multigrid Gaussian-Plane-Wave algorithm can better utilize GPU compute performance by a two-level parallelization scheme and grid-based screening of orbital pairs in the real space. Chapter 4 illustrates the issues of the original modified Coulomb potential from GFN-xTB in periodic systems, and the effectiveness of a new generalized Ewald summation scheme for the potential in X23 molecular crystal dataset and a range of prototypical bulk semiconductors.
Modern videogames place increasing demands on the computational and graphical hardware, leading to novel architectures that have great potential in the context of high performance computing and molecular simulation. We demonstrate that Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) can be used very efficiently to calculate two-electron repulsion integrals over Gaussian basis functions [Formula: see text] the first step in most quantum chemistry calculations. A benchmark test performed for the evaluation of approximately 10(6) (ss|ss) integrals over contracted s-orbitals showed that a naïve algorithm implemented on the GPU achieves up to 130-fold speedup over a traditional CPU implementation on an AMD Opteron. Subsequent calculations of the Coulomb operator for a 256-atom DNA strand show that the GPU advantage is maintained for basis sets including higher angular momentum functions.
This work involves studying and developing new algorithms for molecular numerical integration used for density functional theory and new algorithms for Hartree-Fock method. -- New insight about molecular numerical integration is presented through a detailed study of the performance of some of the well known grids in addition to our implementation of the most recently developed MultiExp grid. A comprehensive study of numerical integration was conducted by evaluating several molecular properties: number of electrons, dipole moment, potential energy, and Coulomb repulsion energy using fifteen grids including a large benchmark grid. The standard grid (SG-1) and a slightly modified version of the Treutler and Alhrichs (TA) grid performed reasonably well. The MultiExp grid, which is more efficient, was studied as well and found to be less accurate. -- Studying large molecules using Hartree-Fock method is a challenge both in terms of CPU time and memory requirements. However, there is a high demand to perform quantum chemical calculations for large molecules. Projection from a smaller basis set to a larger basis set was studied in detail. It was found that projection from the STO-3G basis set to the 6-31G basis set performed well. Projection was used to develop a new version of a divide and conquer algorithm. Our divide and conquer algorithm was used to calculate the protonation energy for a series of peptides. Algorithms to skip calculating two-electron integrals of zero or negligible values are presented in addition to an algorithm to generate a better initial guess.
Electronic structure calculations have the potential to predict key matter transformations for applications of strategic technological importance, from drug discovery to material science and catalysis. However, a predictive physicochemical characterization of these processes often requires accurate quantum chemical modeling of complex molecular systems with hundreds to thousands of atoms. Due to the computationally demanding nature of electronic structure calculations and the complexity of modern high-performance computing hardware, quantum chemistry software has historically failed to operate at such large molecular scales with accuracy and speed that are useful in practice. In this paper, novel algorithms and software are presented that enable extreme-scale quantum chemistry capabilities with particular emphasis on exascale calculations. This includes the development and application of the multi-Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) library LibCChem 2.0 as part of the General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System package and of the standalone Extreme-scale Electronic Structure System (EXESS), designed from the ground up for scaling on thousands of GPUs to perform high-performance accurate quantum chemistry calculations at unprecedented speed and molecular scales. Among various results, we report that the EXESS implementation enables Hartree-Fock/cc-pVDZ plus RI-MP2/cc-pVDZ/cc-pVDZ-RIFIT calculations on an ionic liquid system with 623 016 electrons and 146 592 atoms in less than 45 min using 27 600 GPUs on the Summit supercomputer with a 94.6% parallel efficiency.
Predicting the chemico-physical properties of large molecular systems is a formidable challenge in chemistry and materials science. Traditional quantum mechanical methods, while accurate, have impractical scaling for large molecules with thousands of atoms, which are crucial in the development of novel therapeutics, catalysts, and nanomaterials. To address this, molecular fragmentation algorithms have been proposed to improve scalability and enable extensive parallelism. In this article, we introduce a significant enhancement to the Fragment Molecular Orbital (FMO) method, termed the Coulomb-Perturbed Fragmentation (CPF) method. CPF incorporates algorithmic improvements and implementation enhancements to optimize performance on heterogeneous computing systems equipped with a large number of GPUs. Key developments include a significant simplification of iteratitve self-consistent field (SCF) algorithm, advanced data management through a one-sided communication model, topology-aware optimizations, and a hybrid communication strategy for intra-group exchanges. Moreover, CPF integrates a distributed dynamic multi-layer load balancing scheme to optimise fragment distribution and workload management across nodes and GPUs. Performance evaluations on a 420-atom benzene molecule system comprising 35 fragments reveal that CPF outperforms existing GPU/CPU-based FMO algorithms in both efficiency and accuracy. When deployed on the Gadi supercomputer, CPF achieves over 97% parallel efficiency on 20 nodes, with scalability maintaining above 98% and 90% efficiency in weak-scaling tests for smaller and larger systems, respectively. Notably, CPF matches or exceeds the computational accuracy of conventional FMO methods, marking a substantial progress in the field of computational chemistry for fragmentation-based large-scale molecular modelling.
Graphical Processing Units (GPUs) are highly parallel, programmable accelerators boasting high peak floating point performance. Over the last couple of years the use of GPUs for general purpose computing have revolutionized quantum chemistry. The computational bottleneck in an ab-initio quantum method is the calculation of a large number of twoelectron integrals. To date, a number of GPU accelerated two-electron integral implementations have been developed significantly improving the performance of a static quantum mechanical (QM) calculation. However, when performing an ab-initio QM gradient calculation, optimization, QM or Hybrid Quantum Mechanical/Molecular Mechanical (QM/MM) dynamics simulation the twoelectron integral derivatives arise as an additional bottleneck. Hybrid QM/MM methods particularly dynamics methods are commonly used to study large chemical/biological systems. These methods are a popular choice used for studying reaction mechanisms, conformational and configurational structures important in glycobiology. Usually a semiempirical QM method is used however, these have shown variable accuracy for the study of carbohydrate conformation and prevents an analytical investigation of electronic structure. The use of a higher level of theory, such as an ab initio method, is desirable however this comes at a much greater computational cost. Together with the bottlenecks above this cost results from the polarization of the QM region within an electrostatic embedding scheme, which requires the calculation of a large number of one-electron integral derivatives. Thus for QM/MM calculations the one-electron integral derivatives becomes a third bottleneck together with the two mentioned above. Recently, the above bottlenecks have become popular GPU acceleration targets. This thesis describes an extension of the GPU based Quantum Supercharger Library (QSL) to perform the above calculations/simulations. In contrast to GPU packages developed from the ground up, the QSL is a library of routines aimed at accelerating legacy codes, such as GAMESS-UK, GAMESS-US and NWChem, used in electronic structure calculations. Algorithms are presented for accelerating the one- and two-electron integral derivatives on a GPU. In addition to the derivatives, the one-electron integral calculation was ported to the GPU in order to remove a small additional cost arising for large QM/MM systems. Furthermore, the use of automatic code generation for generating GPU kernels was explored and compared to the original approach. Using the QSL library implemented in GAMESS-UK several benchmark calculations and simulations were performed. These were performed in double precision on a single GPU (Kepler K20) and compared to a single CPU using the 6-31G basis set. A speedup of up to 9.3X is achieved for an ab initio gradient calculation compared to the CPU running an optimized serial version of GAMESS-UK using the Schlegel method. For a single point QM/MM calculation of cellobiose in different sized water spheres (3267-24843 point charges) speedups of between 13X and 34X is achieved. QSL/GAMESS-UK coupled to the CHARMM molecular dynamics package was then used in order to perform accelerated molecular dynamics simulations. Benchmark QM and QM/MM molecular dynamics simulations were performed on cellobiose in vacuo and in a water sphere (45 QM atoms and 24843 point charges respectively). The QSL is able to perform 9.7 ps/day of ab initio QM dynamics and 6.4 ps/day of QM/MM dynamics. Testing of the auto-generated version of the QSL showed better performance for lower angular momentum classes but reduced performance for higher angular momentum classes. The efficiency of the integral and derivative routines within the QSL library was tested on a computationally intense realistic glycobiological condensed phase free energy computation. Ab-initio pucker free energy surfaces/volumes of !-Ribofuranose and !-Glucopyranose in vacuum and in water were computed. These are the first converged Hartree-Fock/MM free energy simulations for these carbohydrates performed in solution. The value of the ab initio Free energy surfaces/volumes was demonstrated through an analysis of solvent polarization effects that are evident through a comparison of the vacuum and solution minimum free energy pathways. In particular the water structure around the pucker conformers, analysis of the primary alcohol distribution as well as analysis of the electronic structure of these conformers reveals that water significantly affects the free energy pathways, primary alcohol distribution and the barriers for inter-conversion between pucker conformers.
We present a GPU-accelerated software package for the evaluation of analytic two-electron energy and gradient contributions in Hartree-Fock (HF) and Density Functional theory (DFT) calculations. The implementation is provided as a Python library with a C++ backend, enabling straightforward integration into modern computational chemistry and drug-discovery workflows. The code supports single-point energy and nuclear gradient evaluations on both single- and multi-GPU systems, and employs MPI-based parallelization with dynamic load balancing in multi-node environments. We report comprehensive benchmarks demonstrating favorable scaling with respect to system size, as well as high throughput for batched evaluations relevant to molecular dynamics, geometry optimization, and large-scale virtual screening. Parallel execution of a single system was carried out on up to 24 A100 GPUs. The implementation builds on optimized GPU-enabled variants of the LibintX and GauXC libraries to efficiently compute density-fitted Coulomb, semi-numerical exchange, and exchange--correlation contributions.