Implementation of complex polarization propagator theory for linear response properties of large molecular systems
Time: Fri 2022-11-18 09.00
Location: D37, Lindstedtsvägen 5, Stockholm
Video link: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/67595336394
Language: English
Subject area: Theoretical Chemistry and Biology
Doctoral student: Manuel Brand , Teoretisk kemi och biologi
Opponent: Professor Berta Fernández Rodríguez, University of Santiago de Compostela
Supervisor: Professor Patrick Norman, Teoretisk kemi och biologi
QC 2022-10-18
Abstract
Since its beginning, the remarkable development from the first commercially available computers toward exascale supercomputers just within the span of a lifetime has been closely intertwined with the perpetual quest for the utilization of the arising computing power for the avail of theoretical chemistry. With the aim of further pushing the limits of computationally accessible molecular system sizes, this thesis includes the presentation of programming efforts, which brought forth two quantum chemical software codes, as well as a range of ab initio studies on carbon-based systems, enabled by the former.
The VeloxChem and Gator programs, developed for spectroscopy simulations at the level of density-functional theory (DFT) and correlated wave function methods, respectively, employ a hybrid message passing interface (MPI)/open multiprocessing (OpenMP) parallelization scheme embedded in a modular program structure written in a Python/C++ layered fashion for the execution in contemporary high-performance computing (HPC) environments. Included numerical solvers for the evaluation of real and complex linear response functions in combination with the parallel construction of auxiliary Fock matrices enable the efficient calculation of one-photon absorption or electronic circular dichroism (CD) spectra in the ultraviolet/visible (UV/vis) or X-ray spectral region, as well as van der Waals C6 dispersion coefficients.
Employing the VeloxChem program in two comprehensive investigations, the C6 dispersion coefficients of carbon fullerenes up to a system size of C540 and the CD spectra of carbohelicenes ranging from CH[5] to CH[30] have been calculated at the DFT level of theory. The revealed non-additive scaling with respect to the number of carbon atoms of N2.2 in the former and nontrivial CD band progressions, arguably linked to the number of overlapping layers in the helical conjugated systems, in the latter rectify the current conception in their respective fields.
In a benchmark for the Gator program on a series of guanine oligomers, the full UV/vis spectrum for a tetrad was calculated at the level of a second-order algebraic-diagrammatic construction (ADC(2)) scheme in just under 15 hours by efficient employment of 32,768 central processing unit (CPU) cores.
Exceeding the limit of 10,000 and 1,000 contracted basis functions for a treatment with the DFT and ADC(2) methods, respectively, these practical examples demonstrate the capability of VeloxChem and Gator to harness vast computational resources made available by contemporary and future HPC systems and thereby routinely address scopes of system sizes that were previously out of reach.