Scalable Nuclear Density Functional Theory with Sky3D

Abstract

In nuclear astrophysics, quantum simulations of large inhomogeneous dense systems as they appear in the crusts of neutron stars present big challenges. The number of particles in a simulation with periodic boundary conditions is strongly limited due to the immense computational cost of the quantum methods. In this paper, we describe techniques for an efficient and scalable parallel implementation of Sky3D, a nuclear density functional theory solver that operates on an equidistant grid. Presented techniques allow Sky3D to achieve good scaling and high performance on a large number of cores, as demonstrated through detailed performance analysis on a Cray XC40 supercomputer.