An extended-Lagrangian scheme for charge equilibration in reactive molecular dynamics simulations

Reactive molecular dynamics (RMD) simulations describe chemical reactions at orders-of-magnitude faster computing speed compared with quantum molecular dynamics (QMD) simulations. A major computational bottleneck of RMD is charge-equilibration (QEq) calculation to describe charge transfer between atoms. Here, we eliminate the speed-limiting iterative minimization of the Coulombic energy in QEq calculation by adapting an extended-Lagrangian scheme that was recently proposed in the context of QMD simulations, Souvatzis and Niklasson (2014). The resulting XRMD simulation code drastically improves energy conservation compared with our previous RMD code, Nomura et al. (2008), while substantially reducing the time-to-solution. The XRMD code has been implemented on parallel computers based on spatial decomposition, achieving a weak-scaling parallel efficiency of 0.977 on 786,432 IBM Blue Gene/Q cores for a 67.6 billion-atom system.