Efficient parallel algorithms in global optimization of potential energy functions for peptides, proteins, and crystals Original Research Article

Global optimization is playing an increasing role in physics, chemistry, and biophysical chemistry. One of the most important applications of global optimization is to find the global minima of the potential energy of molecules or molecular assemblies, such as crystals. The solution of this problem typically requires huge computational effort. Even the fastest processor available is not fast enough to carry out this kind of computation in real time for the problems of real interest, e.g., protein and crystal structure prediction. One way to circumvent this problem is to take advantage of massively parallel computing. In this paper, we provide several examples of parallel implementations of global optimization algorithms developed in our laboratory. All of these examples follow the master/worker approach. Most of the methods are parallelized on the algorithmic (coarse-grain) level and one example of fine-grain parallelism is given, in which the function evaluation itself is computationally expensive. All parallel algorithms were initially implemented on an IBM/SP2 (distributed-memory) machine. In all cases, however, message passing is handled through the standard Message Passing Interface (MPI); consequently the algorithms can also be implemented on any distributed- or shared-memory system that runs MPI. The efficiency of these implementations is discussed.