Quantum ESPRESSO: One Further Step toward the Exascale

We review the status of the Quantum ESPRESSO software suite for electronic-structure calculations based on plane waves, pseudopotentials, and density-functional theory. We highlight the recent developments in the porting to GPUs of the main codes, using an approach based on OpenACC and CUDA Fortran offloading. We describe, in particular, the results achieved on linear-response codes, which are one of the distinctive features of the Quantum ESPRESSO suite. We also present extensive performance benchmarks on different GPU-accelerated architectures for the main codes of the suite

Quantum ESPRESSO toward the exascale

Quantum ESPRESSO is an open-source distribution of computer codes for quantum-mechanical materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, pseudopotentials, and plane waves, and renowned for its performance on a wide range of hardware architectures, from laptops to massively parallel computers, as well as for the breadth of its applications. In this paper, we present a motivation and brief review of the ongoing effort to port Quantum ESPRESSO onto heterogeneous architectures based on hardware accelerators, which will overcome the energy constraints that are currently hindering the way toward exascale computing

Advanced capabilities for materials modelling with Quantum ESPRESSO

Quantum ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of open-source computer codes for quantum simulations of materials using state-of-the art electronic-structure techniques, based on density-functional theory, density-functional perturbation theory, and many-body perturbation theory, within the plane-wave pseudo-potential and projector-augmented-wave approaches. Quantum ESPRESSO owes its popularity to the wide variety of properties and processes it allows to simulate, to its performance on an increasingly broad array of hardware architectures, and to a community of researchers that rely on its capabilities as a core open-source development platform to implement theirs ideas. In this paper we describe recent extensions and improvements, covering new methodologies and property calculators, improved parallelization, code modularization, and extended interoperability both within the distribution and with external software

Fully ab initio IR spectra for complex molecular systems from perturbative vibrational approaches: Glycine as a test case

Perturbative anharmonic computations have been used to simulate the IR spectrum of glycine, taking into account its three most stable conformers. The theoretical results have been directly compared with their experimental counterparts, showing good agreement between the latter and the spectra obtained after proper averaging of the contributions from the three most stable glycine conformers. The results show that direct simulation of the overall vibrational spectrum within a second-order perturbative treatment is feasible and leads to a better understanding of experimental data. Additionally, it has been shown that accurate results can be obtained even when several molecular species need to be considered simultaneously. The computations performed at the B3LYP/aug-N07D level have shown their reliability in the prediction of both vibrational energy levels and IR intensities beyond the harmonic approximation. This kind of computations represents an important tool for the analysis of vibrational spectra for complex medium-to-large molecular systems. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved