An Implementation of the Smooth Particle Mesh Ewald Method on GPU Hardware

Abstract

The smooth particle mesh Ewald summation method is widely used to efficiently compute long-range electrostatic force terms in molecular dynamics simulations, and there has been considerable work in developing optimized implementations for a variety of parallel computer architectures. We describe an implementation for Nvidia graphical processing units (GPUs) which are general purpose computing devices with a high degree of intrinsic parallelism and arithmetic performance. We find that, for typical biomolecular simulations (e.g., DHFR, 26K atoms), a single GPU equipped workstation is able to provide sufficient performance to permit simulation rates of ≈50 ns/day when used in conjunction with the ACEMD molecular dynamics package (1) and exhibits an accuracy comparable to that of a reference double-precision CPU implementation.