Development of a restricted Hartree-Fock program INDMOL on PARAM: a highly parallel computer

Abstract

Parallelization of the SCF method for closed-shell molecules on the highly parallel transputer-based system PARAM is described. The parallelization has been implemented on three different hardware and software environments: (1) a network of bare 64 transputers; (2) configuration 1 plus a back-end file system (BFS); and (3) configuration 2 with one INTEL i860 processor. The evaluation of electron repulsion integrals (ERIs) and setting up of the Fock matrix is carried out in parallel on 64 nodes using minimal communication strategies. A good load balance is achieved for ERI evaluation with the help of bounds, local symmetry features, and the shell concept, as well as a data randomization technique, resulting into almost linear speedup (for ERI evaluation). In configurations 2 and 3, BFS is used for parallel storage and retrieval of ERIs. Further, in 3 matrix operations are implemented as remote procedure calls on the i860 processor. Routine techniques of level shifting and extrapolation are used for accelerating SCF convergence. The resulting package, INDMOL, has been tested for some randomly selected molecules having up to 255 contractions. Using configuration 3, a factor of 2 to 5 in computation time is obtained over 1, for the systems for which the ERIs cannot be stored in the distributed core memory. In summary, a heterogeneous system, as in configuration 3, can indeed be optimally exploited for programming peculiar diverse requirements of the SCF procedure.