A Parallel Orbital-Updating Approach for Electronic Structure Calculations

Abstract: In this paper, we propose an orbital iteration based parallel approach for electronic structure calculations. This approach is based on our understanding of the single-particle equations of independent particles that move in an effective potential. With this new approach, the solution of the single-particle equation is reduced to some solutions of independent linear algebraic systems and a small scale algebraic problem. It is demonstrated by our numerical experiments that this new approach is quite efficient for full-potential calculations for a class of molecular systems.