Parallel decomposition of the tight-binding fictitious Lagrangian algorithm for molecular dynamics simulations of semiconductors
Mei‐Ling Yeh, Jeongnim Kim, Furrukh S. Khan · Computers in Physics · 1995
We present a parallel decomposition of the tight-binding fictitious Lagrangian algorithm for the Intel iPSC/860 and the Intel Paragon parallel computers. We show that it is possible to perform long simulations, of the order of 10 000 time steps, on semiconducting clusters consisting of as many as 512 atoms, on a time scale of the order of 20 h or less. We have made a very careful timing analysis of all parts of our code, and have identified the bottlenecks. We have also derived formulas which can predict the timing of our code, based on the number of processors, message passing bandwidth, floating point performance of each node, and the set up time for message passing, appropriate to the machine being used. The time of the simulation scales as the square of the number of particles, if the number of processors is made to scale linearly with the number of particles. We show that for a system as large as 512 atoms, the main bottleneck of the computation is the orthogonalization of the wave functions, which consumes about 90% of the total time of the simulation. © 1995 American Institute of Physics.