Asynchronous multicanonical basin hopping method and its application to cobalt nanoclusters

Abstract

The multicanonical basin hopping (MUBH) method, which uses a multicanonical weight in the basin hopping (BH) Monte Carlo method, was found to be very efficient for global optimization of large-scale systems such as Lennard-Jones clusters containing more than 150 atoms. We have implemented an asynchronous parallel version of the MUBH method using the message passing interface (MPI) to take advantage of the full usage of multiprocessors in either a homogeneous or heterogeneous computational environment. Based on the intrinsic properties of the Monte Carlo method, this MPI implementation used the task parallelism to minimize interthread data communication. For a Co nanocluster consisting of N atoms, we have applied the asynchronous multicanonical basin hopping (AMUBH) method (for 181 < N < or = 200), together with BH (for 2 < or = N < 150) and MUBH (for 150 < or = N < or = 180), to search for the molecular configuration of the global energy minimum. AMUBH becomes the only practical computational scheme for locating the energy minimum within realistic computational time for a relatively large cluster.