Phaseless Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo on Graphical Processing Units

We present an implementation of phaseless Auxiliary Field Quantum Monte Carlo (ph-AFQMC) utilizing graphical processing units (GPUs). The AFQMC method is recast in terms of matrix operations which are spread across thousands of processing cores and are executed in batches using custom Compute Unified Device Architecture kernels and the GPU-optimized cuBLAS matrix library. Algorithmic advances include a batched Sherman-Morrison-Woodbury algorithm to quickly update matrix determinants and inverses, density fitting of the two-electron integrals, an energy algorithm involving a high-dimensional precomputed tensor, and the use of single-precision floating point arithmetic. These strategies accelerate ph-AFQMC calculations with both single- and multideterminant trial wave functions, though particularly dramatic wall-time reductions are achieved for the latter. For typical calculations we find speed-ups of roughly 2 orders of magnitude using just a single GPU card compared to a single modern CPU core. Furthermore, we achieve near-unity parallel efficiency using 8 GPU cards on a single node and can reach moderate system sizes via a local memory-slicing approach. We illustrate the robustness of our implementation on hydrogen chains of increasing length and through the calculation of all electron ionization potentials of the first-row transition metal atoms. We compare long imaginary-time calculations utilizing a population control algorithm with our previously published correlated sampling approach and show that the latter improves not only the efficiency but also the accuracy of the computed ionization potentials. Taken together, the GPU implementation combined with correlated sampling provides a compelling computational method that will broaden the application of ph-AFQMC to the description of realistic correlated electronic systems.