Parallel and Low-Order Scaling Implementation of Hartree-Fock Exchange Using Local Density Fitting

Calculations using modern linear-scaling electron-correlation methods are often much faster than the necessary reference Hartree-Fock (HF) calculations. We report a newly implemented HF program that speeds up the most time-consuming step, namely, the evaluation of the exchange contributions to the Fock matrix. Using localized orbitals and their sparsity, local density fitting (LDF), and atomic orbital domains, we demonstrate that the calculation of the exchange matrix scales asymptotically linearly with molecular size. The remaining parts of the HF calculation scale cubically but become dominant only for very large molecular sizes or with many processing cores. The method is well parallelized, and the speedup scales well with up to about 100 CPU cores on multiple compute nodes. The effect of the local approximations on the accuracy of computed HF and local second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory energies is systematically investigated, and default values are established for the parameters that determine the domain sizes. Using these values, calculations for molecules with hundreds of atoms in combination with triple-ζ basis sets can be carried out in less than 1 h, with just a few compute nodes. The method can also be used to speed up density functional theory calculations with hybrid functionals that contain HF exchange.