June 18, 2023, 9:53 p.m.
Faculty seminar: Thomas Kühne, Breaking the exaflop barrier for ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations, Tuesday 20.06, 12:30, s. 119
On Tuesday, June 20th, at 12:30, there will be a faculty seminar. The speaker will be Thomas Kühne, a professor of theoretical chemistry at the University of Paderborn, specializing in computational processes in chemistry, who also serves as the director of the CASUS Institute. Our guest will give a lecture entitled Breaking the exaflop barrier for ab-initio molecular dynamics simulations. Before the lecture, we invite you to enjoy some cake and coffee.
The lecture will take place in room 119 at the Institute of Computer Science.
Abstract: We push the boundaries of electronic structure-based ab-initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) beyond 100 million atoms. This scale is otherwise barely reachable with classical force-field methods or novel neural network and machine learning potentials. We achieve this breakthrough by combining innovations in linear-scaling AIMD, efficient and approximate sparse linear algebra, low and mixed-precision floating-point computation on GPUs, and a compensation scheme for the errors introduced by numerical approximations. The core of our work is the non-orthogonalized local submatrix method (NOLSM), which scales very favorably to massively parallel computing systems and translates large sparse matrix operations into highly parallel, dense matrix operations that are ideally suited to hardware accelerators. We demonstrate that the NOLSM method, which is at the center point of each AIMD step, is able to achieve a sustained performance exceeding one exaflop in mixed FP16/FP32 precision corresponding to an efficiency of more than 80% when running on 4400 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.