Title
Strong scaling of general-purpose molecular dynamics simulations on GPUs.
Abstract
We describe a highly optimized implementation of MPI domain decomposition in a GPU-enabled, general-purpose molecular dynamics code, HOOMD-blue (Anderson and Glotzer, 2013). Our approach is inspired by a traditional CPU-based code, LAMMPS (Plimpton, 1995), but is implemented within a code that was designed for execution on GPUs from the start (Anderson et al., 2008). The software supports short-ranged pair force and bond force fields and achieves optimal GPU performance using an autotuning algorithm. We are able to demonstrate equivalent or superior scaling on up to 3375 GPUs in Lennard-Jones and dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) simulations of up to 108 million particles. GPUDirect RDMA capabilities in recent GPU generations provide better performance in full double precision calculations. For a representative polymer physics application, HOOMD-blue 1.0 provides an effective GPU vs. CPU node speed-up of 12.5×.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1016/j.cpc.2015.02.028
Computer Physics Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Multi-GPU,Molecular dynamics,MPI/CUDA,Strong scaling,Weak scaling,Domain decomposition,LAMMPS
Dissipative particle dynamics,Computer science,CUDA,Parallel computing,Double-precision floating-point format,Computational science,Software,Remote direct memory access,Code (cryptography),Scaling,Domain decomposition methods
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
192
0010-4655
31
PageRank 
References 
Authors
1.63
11
8
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jens Glaser1311.63
Trung Dac Nguyen2463.70
Joshua A. Anderson330930.04
Pak Lui4674.65
Filippo Spiga5463.45
Jaime A. Millan6311.63
David C. Morse7311.63
Sharon C. Glotzer810414.69