Accelerating Quantum Light-Matter Dynamics on Graphics Processing Units

To study light-matter interaction, we have developed a linear-scaling DC-MESH (divide-and-conquer Maxwell-Ehrenfest-surface hopping) simulation algorithm, where our globally-sparse and locally-dense electronic solvers, multiple time-scale splitting, and shadow dynamics achieve high scalability and allow the most compute-intensive quantum dynamics kernel based on time-dependent density functional theory to reside on GPU with minimal CPU-GPU data transfer. GPU computation based on OpenMP target constructs is accelerated by: (i) data and loop reordering for better memory access patterns; (ii) hierarchical GPU offloading using teams-distribute and parallel constructs, respectively, for coarse and fine computations; (iii) algebraic ‘BLASification’ of the nonlocal computational bottleneck; and (iv) GPU-resident data structures facilitated by custom C++ class initializer and destructor based on OpenMP target data constructs. We have thereby achieved 644-fold speedup on Nvidia A100 GPU over AMD EPYC 7543 CPU of the Polaris computer at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. In addition, the DC-MESH code exhibits a weak-scaling parallel efficiency of 96.73% on 256 nodes (or 1,024 GPUs) of Polaris for 5,120-atom PbTiO
3
material. This enables the study of light-induced topological switching for future ultrafast and ultralow-power ferroelectric topotronics applications.