The divide–expand–consolidate MP2 scheme goes massively parallel

Abstract

For large molecular systems conventional implementations of second order Møller–Plesset (MP2) theory encounter a scaling wall, both memory- and time-wise. We describe how this scaling wall can be removed. We present a massively parallel algorithm for calculating MP2 energies and densities using the divide–expand–consolidate scheme where a calculation on a large system is divided into many small fragment calculations employing local orbital spaces. The resulting algorithm is linear-scaling with system size, exhibits near perfect parallel scalability, removes memory bottlenecks and does not involve any I/O. The algorithm employs three levels of parallelisation combined via a dynamic job distribution scheme. Results on two molecular systems containing 528 and 1056 atoms (4278 and 8556 basis functions) using 47,120 and 94,240 cores are presented. The results demonstrate the scalability of the algorithm both with respect to the number of cores and with respect to system size. The presented algorithm is thus highly suited for large super computer architectures and allows MP2 calculations on large molecular systems to be carried out within a few hours – for example, the correlated calculation on the molecular system containing 1056 atoms took 2.37 hours using 94240 cores.