Highly Efficient Resolution-of-Identity Density Functional Theory Calculations on Central and Graphics Processing Units


2021-02-22

Jörg Kussmann, Henryk Laqua, and Christian Ochsenfeld

J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2021, 17, 1512−1521

https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jctc.0c01252

We present an efficient method to evaluate Coulomb potential matrices using the resolution of identity approximation and semilocal exchange-correlation potentials on central (CPU) and graphics processing units (GPU). The new GPU-based RI-algorithm shows a high performance and ensures the favorable scaling with increasing basis set size as the conventional CPU-based method. Furthermore, our method is based on the J-engine algorithm [White; , Head-Gordon, J. Chem. Phys. 1996, 7, 2620], which allows for further optimizations that also provide a significant improvement of the corresponding CPU-based algorithm. Due to the increased performance for the Coulomb evaluation, the calculation of the exchange-correlation potential of density functional theory on CPUs quickly becomes a bottleneck to the overall computational time. Hence, we also present a GPU-based algorithm to evaluate the exchange-correlation terms, which results in an overall high-performance method for density functional calculations. The algorithms to evaluate the potential and nuclear derivative terms are discussed, and their performance on CPUs and GPUs is demonstrated for illustrative calculations.