Acceleration of the CASINO quantum Monte Carlo software using graphics processing units and OpenACC

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how leveraging GPUs and OpenACC can significantly accelerate quantum Monte Carlo calculations in the CASINO software, enabling faster simulations of electron gases and bulk materials.

Contribution

The paper introduces GPU and OpenACC acceleration techniques for CASINO, improving computational speed for quantum Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Speedups of up to 2.5 times with GPU acceleration

Single-precision arithmetic further increases speed without losing accuracy

Effective acceleration for simulations with several hundred particles

Abstract

We describe how quantum Monte Carlo calculations using the CASINO software can be accelerated using graphics processing units (GPUs) and OpenACC. In particular we consider offloading Ewald summation, the evaluation of long-range two-body terms in the Jastrow correlation factor, and the evaluation of orbitals in a blip basis set. We present results for three- and two-dimensional homogeneous electron gases and ab initio simulations of bulk materials, showing that significant speedups of up to a factor of 2.5 can be achieved by the use of GPUs when several hundred particles are included in the simulations. The use of single-precision arithmetic can improve the speedup further without significant detriment to the accuracy of the calculations.