Sassena — X-ray and neutron scattering calculated from molecular dynamics trajectories using massively parallel computers Original Research Article

Massively parallel computers now permit the molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of multi-million atom systems on time scales up to the microsecond. However, the subsequent analysis of the resulting simulation trajectories has now become a high performance computing problem in itself. Here, we present software for calculating X-ray and neutron scattering intensities from MD simulation data that scales well on massively parallel supercomputers. The calculation and data staging schemes used maximize the degree of parallelism and minimize the IO bandwidth requirements. The strong scaling tested on the Jaguar Petaflop Cray XT5 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory exhibits virtually linear scaling up to 7000 cores for most benchmark systems. Since both MPI and thread parallelism is supported, the software is flexible enough to cover scaling demands for different types of scattering calculations. The result is a high performance tool capable of unifying large-scale supercomputing and a wide variety of neutron/synchrotron technology.