Related Experiment Video
Updated: May 21, 2025

Computation of Atmospheric Concentrations of Molecular Clusters from ab initio Thermochemistry
Published on: April 8, 2020
Acceleration of the Relativistic Dirac-Kohn-Sham Method with GPU: A Pre-Exascale Implementation of BERTHA and
Loriano Storchi1,2, Laura Bellentani3, Jeff Hammond4
1Dipartimento di Farmacia, Università G. d'Annunzio Chieti-Pescara, via dei Vestini 31, 66100 Chieti, Italy.
Abstract:
In this paper, we present the recent advances in the computation of the Dirac-Kohn-Sham (DKS) method of the BERTHA code. We show here that the simple underlined structure of the FORTRAN code also favors efficient porting of the code to GPUs, leading to a particularly efficient hybrid CPU/GPU implementation (OpenMP/OpenACC), where the most computationally intensive part for DKS matrix evaluation (three-center two-electron integrals evaluated via the McMurchie-Davidson scheme) is efficiently offloaded to the GPU via compiler directives based on the OpenACC programming model. This scheme in combination with the use of a linear algebra library optimized for GPUs (cuBLAS, cuSOLVER) significantly accelerates the DKS calculations. In addition, the low-level integral kernel developed here at FORTRAN level was used to port our real-time DKS (RT-TDDKS) implementation based on Python (PyBERTHART) for the utilization of the GPU. The results obtained on the new Tier-0 EuroHPC supercomputer (LEONARDO) of the CINECA Supercomputing Centre with a single NVIDIA A100 card are very satisfactory. We achieve a speedup up to 30 for Au16 in a single-point DKS energy calculation and up to 10 for the Au8 systems in an RT-TDDKS calculation, compared to our OpenMP (i.e., CPU only) parallel implementation (with 32 cores). The approach presented here is very general and, to our knowledge, represents the first port of a Python API to GPUs based on a FORTRAN kernel for the evaluation of two-electron integrals. The implementation is currently limited to the use of a single GPU accelerator, but future paths to an actual exascale implementation are discussed.
Related Concept Videos
Fermi Level Dynamics
Electron affinity in semiconductors refers to the energy gap between the minimum of its conduction band and the vacuum level and it is a critical parameter in determining how easily a semiconductor can accept additional electrons.
The work...
Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution: Problem Solving
This distribution function f(v) is defined by saying that the expected number N (v1,v2) of particles with speeds between v1 and v2 is given by
Accelerating Fluids
The motion of the liquid within this infinitesimal cylinder is considered to obtain the pressure difference. Three vertical forces act on this liquid:
Ampere-Maxwell's Law: Problem-Solving
To solve the problem, we can use the equations from the analysis of an RC circuit and Maxwell's version of Ampère's law.
For the first part of...
Radiation Pressure: Problem Solving
The average value of the rate of momentum transfer divided by the absorbing area represents the average force...
Acceleration Vectors

