Abstract
We test the relative performances of two different approaches to the computation of forces for molecular dynamics simulations on graphics processing units. A "vertex-based" approach, where a computing thread is started per particle, is compared to an "edge-based" approach, where a thread is started per each potentially non-zero interaction. We find that the former is more efficient for systems with many simple interactions per particle while the latter is more efficient if the system has more complicated interactions or fewer of them. By comparing computation times on more and less recent graphics processing unit technology, we predict that, if the current trend of increasing the number of processing cores - as opposed to their computing power - remains, the "edge-based" approach will gradually become the most efficient choice in an increasing number of cases.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-8 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Journal of Computational Chemistry |
Volume | 36 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 30 2015 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Graphics processing unit
- Molecular dynamics
- Parallelization
- Soft matter
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Chemistry
- Computational Mathematics