Quantum Chemical Calculations Using Accelerators: Migrating Matrix Operations to the NVIDIA Kepler GPU and the Intel Xeon Phi

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2014-02-01
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Sok Leang, Sarom
Rendell, Alistair
Gordon, Mark
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Ames National Laboratory

Ames National Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), operated by and located on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa.

For more than 70 years, the Ames National Laboratory has successfully partnered with Iowa State University, and is unique among the 17 DOE laboratories in that it is physically located on the campus of a major research university. Many of the scientists and administrators at the Laboratory also hold faculty positions at the University and the Laboratory has access to both undergraduate and graduate student talent.

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Chemistry

The Department of Chemistry seeks to provide students with a foundation in the fundamentals and application of chemical theories and processes of the lab. Thus prepared they me pursue careers as teachers, industry supervisors, or research chemists in a variety of domains (governmental, academic, etc).

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The Department of Chemistry was founded in 1880.

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1880-present

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Ames National LaboratoryChemistry
Abstract

Increasingly, modern computer systems comprise a multicore general-purpose processor augmented with a number of special purpose devices or accelerators connected via an external interface such as a PCI bus. The NVIDIA Kepler Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) and the Intel Phi are two examples of such accelerators. Accelerators offer peak performances that can be well above those of the host processor. How to exploit this heterogeneous environment for legacy application codes is not, however, straightforward. This paper considers how matrix operations in typical quantum chemical calculations can be migrated to the GPU and Phi systems. Double precision general matrix multiply operations are endemic in electronic structure calculations, especially methods that include electron correlation, such as density functional theory, second order perturbation theory, and coupled cluster theory. The use of approaches that automatically determine whether to use the host or an accelerator, based on problem size, is explored, with computations that are occurring on the accelerator and/or the host. For data-transfers over PCI-e, the GPU provides the best overall performance for data sizes up to 4096 MB with consistent upload and download rates between 5–5.6 GB/s and 5.4–6.3 GB/s, respectively. The GPU outperforms the Phi for both square and nonsquare matrix multiplications.

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Reprinted (adapted) with permission from Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation 10 (2014): 908, doi:10.1021/ct4010596. Copyright 2014 American Chemical Society.

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Wed Jan 01 00:00:00 UTC 2014
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