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Updated: Mar 19, 2026

Multiscale Sampling of a Heterogeneous Water/Metal Catalyst Interface using Density Functional Theory and Force-Field Molecular Dynamics
Published on: April 12, 2019
Three pillars for achieving quantum mechanical molecular dynamics simulations of huge systems: Divide-and-conquer,
Hiroaki Nishizawa1, Yoshifumi Nishimura1,2, Masato Kobayashi3,4,5
1Department of Theoretical and Computational Molecular Science, Institute for Molecular Science, Okazaki, 444-8585, Japan.
Abstract:
The linear-scaling divide-and-conquer (DC) quantum chemical methodology is applied to the density-functional tight-binding (DFTB) theory to develop a massively parallel program that achieves on-the-fly molecular reaction dynamics simulations of huge systems from scratch. The functions to perform large scale geometry optimization and molecular dynamics with DC-DFTB potential energy surface are implemented to the program called DC-DFTB-K. A novel interpolation-based algorithm is developed for parallelizing the determination of the Fermi level in the DC method. The performance of the DC-DFTB-K program is assessed using a laboratory computer and the K computer. Numerical tests show the high efficiency of the DC-DFTB-K program, a single-point energy gradient calculation of a one-million-atom system is completed within 60 s using 7290 nodes of the K computer. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

