Publications Details

Performance Modeling of Vectorized SNAP Inter-Atomic Potentials on CPU Architectures

Blanco, Mark P.; Kim, Kyungjoo K.

SNAP potentials are inter-atomic potentials for molecular dynamics that enable simulations at accuracy levels comparable to density functional theory(DFT) at a fraction of the cost. As such, SNAP scales to on the order of 10⁴ — 10⁶ atoms. In this work, we explore CPU optimization of potentials computation using SIMD. We note that efficient use of SIMD is non-obvious as the application features an irregular iteration space for various potential terms, necessitating use of SIMD across atoms in a cross matrix, batched fashion. We present a preliminary analytic model to determine the correct batch size for several CPU architectures across several vendors, and show end-to-end speedups between 1.66x and 3.22x compared to the original.