Molecular dynamics beyonds the limits: Massive scaling on 72 racks of a BlueGene/P and supercooled glass dynamics of a 1 billion particles system

We report scaling results on the world’s largest supercomputer of our recently developed Billions-Body Molecular Dynamics (BBMD) package, which was especially designed for massively parallel simulations of the short-range atomic dynamics in structural glasses and amorphous materials. The code was able to scale up to 72 racks of an IBM BlueGene/P, with a measured 89% efficiency for a system with 100 billion particles. The code speed, with 0.13 s per iteration in the case of 1 billion particles, paves the way to the study of billion-body structural glasses with a resolution increase of two orders of magnitude with respect to the largest simulation ever reported. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our code by studying the liquid–glass transition of an exceptionally large system made by a binary mixture of 1 billion particles.