Improving efficiency of large time-scale molecular dynamics simulations of hydrogen-rich systems

A systematic analysis is performed on the effectiveness of removing degrees of freedom from hydrogen atoms and/or increasing hydrogen masses to increase the efficiency of molecular dynamics simulations of hydrogen-rich systems such as proteins in water. In proteins, high-frequency bond-angle vibrations involving hydrogen atoms limit the time step to 3 fs, which is already a factor of 1.5 beyond the commonly used time step of 2 fs. Removing these degrees of freedom from the system by constructing hydrogen atoms as dummy atoms, allows the time step to be increased to 7 fs, a factor of 3.5 compared with 2 fs. Additionally, a gain in simulation stability can be achieved by increasing the masses of hydrogen atoms with remaining degrees of freedom from 1 to 4 u. Increasing hydrogen mass without removing the high-frequency degrees of freedom allows the time step to be increased only to 4 fs, a factor of two, compared with 2 fs. The net gain in efficiency of sampling configurational space may be up to 15% lower than expected from the increase in time step due to the increase in viscosity and decrease in diffusion constant. In principle, introducing dummy atoms and increasing hydrogen mass do not influence thermodynamical properties of the system and dynamical properties are shown to be influenced only to a moderate degree. Comparing the maximum time step attainable with these methods (7 fs) to the time step of 2 fs that is routinely used in simulation, and taking into account the increase in viscosity and decrease in diffusion constant, we can say that a net gain in simulation efficiency of a factor of 3 to 3.5 can be achieved. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Comput Chem 20: 786-798, 1999.