Implementation of EAM and FS potentials in HOOMD-blue

ORAL

Abstract

HOOMD-blue$^{\mathrm{[1]}}$ is a general-purpose software to perform classical molecular dynamics simulations entirely on GPUs. We provide full support for EAM and FS type potentials in HOOMD-blue, and report accuracy and efficiency benchmarks, including comparisons with the LAMMPS$^{\mathrm{[2]}}$ GPU$^{\mathrm{[3]}}$ package. Two problems were selected to test the accuracy: the determination of the glass transition temperature of Cu$_{\mathrm{64.5}}$Zr$_{\mathrm{35.5}}$ alloy using an FS potential and the calculation of pair distribution functions of Ni$_{\mathrm{3}}$Al using an EAM potential. In both cases, the results using HOOMD-blue are indistinguishable from those obtained by the GPU package in LAMMPS within statistical uncertainties. As tests for time efficiency, we benchmark time-steps per second using LAMMPS GPU and HOOMD-blue on one NVIDIA Tesla GPU. Compared to our typical LAMMPS simulations on one CPU cluster node which has 16 CPUs, LAMMPS GPU can be 3-3.5 times faster, and HOOMD-blue can be 4-5.5 times faster. [1] Anderson, J. A., Lorenz, C. D., Travesset, A. J Comp Phys, 227(10), 5342--5359, (2008). [2] S. Plimpton, J Comp Phys, 117, 1-19 (1995). [3] W. M. Brown, P. Wang, S. J. Plimpton, A. N. Tharrington, Comp Phys Comm, 182, 898-911, (2011).

*We acknowledge the support from Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) of Ames Laboratory.

Authors

  • Lin Yang

    • Ames Lab, Iowa State University
  • Feng Zhang

    • Ames Lab
    • Ames Laboratory of US Department of Energy
  • Alex Travesset

    • Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University
    • Iowa State University, Ames Lab
    • Iowa State University and Ames lab
    • Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University and Ames Lab
  • Cai-Zhuang Wang

    • Ames Lab and Iowa State University
    • Ames Laboratory, US DOE, Ames, IA, USA
    • Ames Lab, Iowa State University
    • Ames Laboratory–U.S. Department of Energy, and Department of Physics and Astronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011, USA
    • Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University, Ames, IA 50011
    • Ames Laboratory, US DOE
    • Ames Laboratory of US Department of Energy
  • Kai-Ming Ho

    • Ames Lab and Iowa State University
    • Ames Lab, Iowa State University
    • Ames Laboratory of US Department of Energy