Nonadiabatic Molecular Dynamics on Graphics Processing Units: Performance and Application to Rotary Molecular Motors

Nonadiabatic molecular dynamics (NAMD) simulations of molecular systems require the efficient evaluation of excited-state properties, such as energies, gradients, and nonadiabatic coupling vectors. Here, we investigate the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) in addition to central processing units (CPUs) to efficiently calculate these properties at the time-dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) level of theory. Our implementation in the FermiONs++ program package uses the J-engine and a preselective screening procedure for the calculation of Coulomb and exchange kernels, respectively. We observe good speed-ups for small and large molecular systems (comparable to those observed in ground-state calculations) and reduced (down to sublinear) scaling behavior with respect to the system size (depending on the spatial locality of the investigated excitation). As a first illustrative application, we present efficient NAMD simulations of a series of newly designed light-driven rotary molecular motors and compare their S₁ lifetimes. Although all four rotors show different S₁ excitation energies, their ability to rotate upon excitation is conserved, making the series an interesting starting point for rotary molecular motors with tunable excitation energies.