Title
MDLab: a molecular dynamics simulation prototyping environment.
Abstract
Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation involves solving Newton's equations of motion for a system of atoms, by calculating forces and updating atomic positions and velocities over a timestep Delta t. Despite the large amount of computing power currently available, the timescale of MD simulations is limited by both the small timestep required for propagation, and the expensive algorithm for computing pairwise forces. These issues are currently addressed through the development of efficient simulation methods, some of which make acceptable approximations and as a result can afford larger timesteps. We present MDLab, a development environment for MD simulations built with Python which facilitates prototyping, testing, and debugging of these methods. MDLab provides constructs which allow the development of propagators, force calculators, and high level sampling protocols that run several instances of molecular dynamics. For computationally demanding sampling protocols which require testing on large biomolecules, MDL includes an interface to the OpenMM libraries of Friedrichs et al. which execute on graphical processing units (CPUs) and achieve considerable speedup over execution on the CPU. As an example of an interesting high level method developed in MDLab, we present a parallel implementation of the On-The-Fly string method of Maragliano and Vanden-Eijnden. MDLab is available at http://mdlab.source forge. net. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 31: 1345-1356, 2010
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1002/jcc.21418
JOURNAL OF COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY
Keywords
Field
DocType
molecular dynamics,sampling,Python,scripting,propagation,parallelism,On-The-Fly string method
Pairwise comparison,Central processing unit,Computer science,CUDA,Parallel computing,Computational science,Sampling (statistics),Python (programming language),Speedup,Scripting language,Debugging
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
31.0
7
0192-8651
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
7
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Trevor Cickovski19213.78
Santanu Chatterjee223411.69
Jacob Wenger300.34
Christopher R Sweet482.30
Jesús A. Izaguirre512915.40