Massively parallel first-principles simulation of electron dynamics in materials

We present a highly scalable, parallel implementation of first-principles electron dynamics coupled with molecular dynamics (MD). By using optimized kernels, network topology aware communication, and by fully distributing all terms in the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equation, we demonstrate unprecedented time to solution for disordered aluminum systems of 2000 atoms (22,000 electrons) and 5400 atoms (59,400 electrons), with wall clock time as low as 7.5 s per MD time step. Despite a significant amount of non-local communication required in every iteration, we achieved excellent strong scaling and sustained performance on the Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer at LLNL. We obtained up to 59% of the theoretical sustained peak performance on 16,384 nodes and performance of 8.75 Petaflop/s (43% of theoretical peak) on the full 98,304 node machine (1,572,864 cores). Scalable explicit electron dynamics allows for the study of phenomena beyond the reach of standard first-principles MD, in particular, materials subject to strong or rapid perturbations, such as pulsed electromagnetic radiation, particle irradiation, or strong electric currents.