Electronic structure calculations and molecular dynamics simulations with linear system-size scaling

During the past decades, quantum mechanical methods have undergone an amazing transition from pioneering investigations of experts into a wide range of practical applications, made by a vast community of researchers. First principles calculations of systems containing up to a few hundred atoms have become a standard in many branches of science. The sizes of the systems which can be simulated have increased even further during recent years, and quantum-mechanical calculations ...

In this paper, we propose a parallel optimization method for electronic structure calculations based on a single orbital-updating approximation. It is shown by our numerical experiments that the method is efficient and reliable for atomic and molecular systems of large scale over supercomputers.

We present a new method which combines Car-Parrinello and Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics in order to accelerate density functional theory based ab-initio simulations. Depending on the system a gain in efficiency of one to two orders of magnitude has been observed, which allows ab-initio molecular dynamics of much larger time and length scales than previously thought feasible. It will be demonstrated that the dynamics is correctly reproduced and that high accuracy can be ...

We present an approach to the DFT+U method (Density Functional Theory + Hubbard model) within which the computational effort for calculation of ground state energies and forces scales linearly with system size. We employ a formulation of the Hubbard model using nonorthogonal projector functions to define the localized subspaces, and apply it to a local-orbital DFT method including in situ orbital optimization. The resulting approach thus combines linear-scaling and systematic...

Total energy electronic structure calculations, based on density functional theory or on the more empirical tight binding approach, are generally believed to scale as the cube of the number of electrons. By using the localisaton property of the high temperature density matrix we present exact deterministic algorithms that scale linearly in one dimension and quadratically in all others. We also introduce a stochastic algorithm that scales linearly with system size. These resul...

We present an efficient and scalable computational approach for conducting projected population analysis from real-space finite-element (FE) based Kohn-Sham density functional theory calculations (DFT-FE). This work provides an important direction towards extracting chemical bonding information from large-scale DFT calculations on materials systems involving thousands of atoms while accommodating periodic, semi-periodic or fully non-periodic boundary conditions. Towards this,...

By including a fraction of exact exchange (EXX), hybrid functionals reduce the self-interaction error in semi-local density functional theory (DFT), and thereby furnish a more accurate and reliable description of the electronic structure in systems throughout biology, chemistry, physics, and materials science. However, the high computational cost associated with the evaluation of all required EXX quantities has limited the applicability of hybrid DFT in the treatment of large...

We derive an automatic procedure for generating a set of highly localized, non-orthogonal orbitals for linear scaling quantum Monte Carlo calculations. We demonstrate the advantage of these orbitals in calculations of the total energy of both semiconducting and metallic systems by studying bulk silicon and the homogeneous electron gas. For silicon, the improved localization of these orbitals reduces the computational time by a factor five and the memory by a factor of six com...

We have developed a set of techniques for performing large scale ab initio calculations using multigrid accelerations and a real-space grid as a basis. The multigrid methods permit efficient calculations on ill-conditioned systems with long length scales or high energy cutoffs. The technique has been applied to systems containing up to 100 atoms, including a highly elongated diamond cell, an isolated C$_{60}$ molecule, and a 32-atom cell of GaN with the Ga d-states in valence...

We present a tensor-structured algorithm for efficient large-scale DFT calculations by constructing a Tucker tensor basis that is adapted to the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian and localized in real-space. The proposed approach uses an additive separable approximation to the Kohn-Sham Hamiltonian and an $L_1$ localization technique to generate the 1-D localized functions that constitute the Tucker tensor basis. Numerical results show that the resulting Tucker tensor basis exhibits expo...