OpenCL realization of some many-body potentials

Abstract

Modeling of carbon nanostructures by means of classical molecular dynamics requires a lot of computations. One of the ways to improve the performance of basic algorithms is to transform them for running on SIMD-type computing systems such as systems with dedicated GPU. In this work we describe the development of algorithms for computation of many-body interaction based on Tersoff and embedded-atom potentials by means of OpenCL technology. OpenCL standard provides universality and portability of the algorithms and can be successfully used for development of the software for heterogeneous computing systems. The performance of algorithms is evaluated on CPU and GPU hardware platforms. It is shown that concurrent memory writes is effective for Tersoff bond order potential. The same approach for embedded-atom potential is shown to be slower than algorithm without concurrent memory access. Performance evaluation shows a significant GPU acceleration of energy-force evaluation algorithms for many-body potentials in comparison to the corresponding serial implementations.

Keywords

• GPGPU; OpenCL; many-body potentials; Tersoff potential; embedded-atom potential; atomic operations