Optimized analysis of isotropic high-nuclearity spin clusters with GPU acceleration

Abstract

The numerical simulation of molecular clusters formed by a finite number of exchange-coupled paramagnetic centers is very relevant for many applications, modeling systems between molecules and extended solids. In the context of realistic scenarios, many centers need to be considered, and thus the required computational effort grows very fast. In a previous work (Ramos et al., 2010), a set of parallel programs were presented with standard message-passing parallelization (MPI) for both anisotropic and isotropic systems. In this work, we have further developed the code for isotropic models. On one hand, the computational cost has been significantly reduced by avoiding some of the matrix diagonalizations, corresponding to blocks with negligible contribution for the particular configuration. On the other hand, we have extended the parallelization in order to exploit available graphics processing units (GPUs). The new MPI-GPU paradigm reduces the computational time by at least one additional order of magnitude and enables the resolution of larger problems. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.