mAMBER: A CPU/MIC collaborated parallel framework for AMBER on Tianhe-2 supercomputer

Abstract

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method of studying physical movements of atoms and molecules that provide detailed microscopic sampling on molecular scale. With the continuous efforts and improvements, MD simulation gained popularity in materials science, biochemistry and biophysics with various application areas and expanding data scale. Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement (AMBER) is one of the most widely used software packages for conducting MD simulations. However, the speed of AMBER MD simulations for system with millions of atoms in microsecond scale still need to be improved. In this paper, we propose a parallel acceleration strategy for AMBER on Tianhe-2 supercomputer. The parallel optimization of AMBER is carried out on three different levels: fine grained OpenMP parallel on a single MIC, single-node CPU/MIC collaborated parallel optimization and multi-node multi-MIC collaborated parallel acceleration. By the three levels of parallel acceleration strategy above, we achieved the highest speedup of 25–33 times compared with the original program. Source Code: https://github.com/tianhe2/mAMBER