A massively-parallel electronic-structure calculations based on real-space density functional theory

Based on the real-space finite-difference method, we have developed a first-principles density functional program that efficiently performs large-scale calculations on massively-parallel computers. In addition to efficient parallel implementation, we also implemented several computational improvements, substantially reducing the computational costs of O(N3)O(N3) operations such as the Gram–Schmidt procedure and subspace diagonalization. Using the program on a massively-parallel computer cluster with a theoretical peak performance of several TFLOPS, we perform electronic-structure calculations for a system consisting of over 10,000 Si atoms, and obtain a self-consistent electronic-structure in a few hundred hours. We analyze in detail the costs of the program in terms of computation and of inter-node communications to clarify the efficiency, the applicability, and the possibility for further improvements.