Under the support of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
(T2222026) and other programs, the research achievement "Pushing the Limit of
Quantum Mechanical Simulation to the Raman Spectrum of a Biological System with
100 Million Atoms" completed by Professor Shang Honghui and Professor Yang
Jinlong of the Key Laboratory of Precision and Intelligent Chemistry of the
University of Science and Technology of China in cooperation with Liu Ying, a
senior engineer of the Institute of Computing Technology of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, and Professor He Xiao of East China Normal University was
successfully shortlisted for the Gordon Bell Award in 2024(
https://sc24.supercomputing.org/2024/10/presenting-the-finalists-for-the-2024-gordon-bell-prize/
). This is the only research achievement from China that has been shortlisted,
and it is also the team's second nomination for this award since 2021. The
Gordon Bell Prize is the highest international award in the field of
high-performance computing applications, awarded by the American Computer
Society (ACM) to recognize outstanding achievements in high-performance
computing worldwide, especially innovative work in the application of
high-performance computing to science, engineering, and large-scale data
analysis. It is known as the "Nobel Prize in Supercomputing". Paper link:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/SC41406.2024.00011 .
Raman spectroscopy is an important tool for studying the structure of
biomolecules, widely used in fields such as drug development and disease
diagnosis. However, the quantum simulation of Raman spectroscopy requires
enormous computational resources. The previous Raman spectrum quantum simulation
can only deal with small systems with thousands of atoms. The QF-RAMAN program
developed by the research team has broken this limit, and realized the Raman
spectrum quantum simulation of COVID-19 spike protein containing more than 100
million atoms in aqueous solution for the first time. This breakthrough is
attributed to the team's multiple innovations in algorithm design and
engineering technology. In traditional density functional theory (DFT) and
density functional perturbation theory (DFPT) calculations, the computational
complexity increases exponentially with the size of the system, which limits the
calculations to small systems. In response to this issue, the team has developed
a new method that deeply integrates all electron full potential density
functional perturbation theory with quantum partitioning algorithm. By
decomposing complex biomolecules into multiple subsystems, the computational
complexity is significantly reduced. At the same time, the team has developed a
multi-level scheduling technology that is sensitive to block size to address the
load balancing challenge of massive block computing, improving the parallel
scalability of massive block computing; Elastic task offloading technology is
proposed to address the heterogeneous acceleration challenges of small-scale
operations; By flexibly aggregating small-scale operations, the hardware
utilization of heterogeneous accelerators has been significantly improved. In
addition, the QF-RAMAN program adopts the OpenCL universal heterogeneous
parallel computing framework, which can run across platforms on supercomputers
with different hardware architectures (CPU, GPU, SW, etc.) using the OpenCL
compilation toolchain (oneAPI, rocm, swcl, etc.). On the latest generation of
Shenwei supercomputer, the program utilizes 96000 computing nodes (over 37
million computing cores) to achieve dual precision peak performance of 399.9
PFLOP/s; On the Eastern supercomputer, using 6000 nodes (24000 GPUs), it also
demonstrated excellent performance of 85 PFLOP/s. The strong and weak
scalability performance of both supercomputers are close to the ideal value,
fully demonstrating the efficiency and scalability of this method. On this
basis, the team proposed a new algorithm for solving Raman spectra using matrix
equations applicable to billion level atomic systems, which avoids direct
diagonalization and provides a new solution for high-precision Raman
spectroscopy calculations, effectively solving key technical problems in
large-scale quantum mechanical Raman simulations.
This study not only demonstrates China's leading position in
high-performance computing and computational chemistry, but also extends quantum
mechanics simulation to unprecedented computational scales, opening up new
avenues for understanding complex biological systems and exploring more
application scenarios for quantum mechanics simulation.