Accelerating Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations of Solids with Graphical Processing Unit

Abstract: We outline how auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) can leverage graphical processing units (GPUs) to accelerate the simulation of solid state sytems. By exploiting conservation of crystal momentum in the one- and two-electron integrals we show how to efficiently formulate the algorithm to best utilize current GPU architectures. We provide a detailed description of different optimization strategies and profile our implementation relative to standard approaches, demonstrating a factor of 40 speed up over a CPU implementation. With this increase in computational power we demonstrate the ability of AFQMC to systematically converge solid state calculations with respect to basis set and system size by computing the cohesive energy of Carbon in the diamond structure to within 0.02 eV of the experimental result.