ICAMS / Interdisciplinary Centre for Advanced Materials Simulation

Publications

Efficient parallelization of analytic bond-order potentials for large-scale atomistic simulations

C. Teijeiro Barjas, T. Hammerschmidt, R. Drautz, G. Sutmann.

Computer Physics Communications, 204, 64-73, (2016)

Comparison of weak scaling behaviour for different parallel implementations of analytic bond-order potentials. The implemented approaches differ by the ratio of redundancy and type of communication

Abstract
Analytic bond-order potentials (BOPs) provide a way to compute atomistic properties with controllable accuracy. For large-scale computations of heterogeneous compounds at the atomistic level, both the computational efficiency and memory demand of BOP implementations have to be optimized. Since the evaluation of BOPs is a local operation within a finite environment, the parallelization concepts known from short-range interacting particle simulations can be applied to improve the performance of these simulations. In this work, several efficient parallelization methods for BOPs that use three-dimensional domain decomposition schemes are described. The schemes are implemented into the bond-order potential code BOPfox, and their performance is measured in a series of benchmarks. Systems of up to several millions of atoms are simulated on a high performance computing system, and parallel scaling is demonstrated for up to thousands of processors.


Keyword(s): bond-order potentials, large-scale simulations, parallelization, MPI
DOI: 10.1016/j.cpc.2016.03.008
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