No Arabic abstract
We propose a method to extend the fast on-the-fly weight determination scheme for simulated tempering to two-dimensional space including not only temperature but also pressure. During the simulated tempering simulation, weight parameters for temperature-update and pressure-update are self-updated independently according to the trapezoidal rule. In order to test the effectiveness of the algorithm, we applied our proposed method to a peptide, chignolin, in explicit water. After setting all weight parameters to zero, the weight parameters were quickly determined during the simulation. The simulation realised a uniform random walk in the entire temperature-pressure space.
We present generalized-ensemble algorithms for isobaric-isothermal molecular simulations. In addition to the multibaric-multithermal algorithm and replica-exchange method for the isobaric-isothermal ensemble, which have already been proposed, we propose a simulated tempering method for this ensemble. We performed molecular dynamics simulations with these algorithms for an alanine dipeptide system in explicit water molecules to test the effectiveness of the algorithms. We found that these generalized-ensemble algorithms are all useful for conformational sampling of biomolecular systems in the isobaric-isothermal ensemble.
The computational study of conformational transitions in RNA and proteins with atomistic molecular dynamics often requires suitable enhanced sampling techniques. We here introduce a novel method where concurrent metadynamics are integrated in a Hamiltonian replica-exchange scheme. The ladder of replicas is built with different strength of the bias potential exploiting the tunability of well-tempered metadynamics. Using this method, free-energy barriers of individual collective variables are significantly reduced compared with simple force-field scaling. The introduced methodology is flexible and allows adaptive bias potentials to be self-consistently constructed for a large number of simple collective variables, such as distances and dihedral angles. The method is tested on alanine dipeptide and applied to the difficult problem of conformational sampling in a tetranucleotide.
We performed two-dimensional simulated tempering (ST) simulations of the two-dimensional Ising model with different lattice sizes in order to investigate the two-dimensional STs applicability to dealing with phase transitions and to study the crossover of critical scaling behavior. The external field, as well as the temperature, was treated as a dynamical variable updated during the simulations. Thus, this simulation can be referred to as Simulated Tempering and Magnetizing (STM). We also performed the Simulated Magnetizing (SM) simulations, in which the external field was considered as a dynamical variable and temperature was not. As has been discussed by previous studies, the ST method is not always compatible with first-order phase transitions. This is also true in the magnetizing process. Flipping of the entire magnetization did not occur in the SM simulations under $T_mathrm{c}$ in large lattice-size simulations. However, the phase changed through the high temperature region in the STM simulations. Thus, the dimensional extension let us eliminate the difficulty of the first-order phase transitions and study wide area of the phase space. We then discuss how frequently parameter-updating attempts should be made for optimal convergence. The results favor frequent attempts. We finally study the crossover behavior of the phase transitions with respect to the temperature and external field. The crossover behavior was clearly observed in the simulations in agreement with the theoretical implications.
Parallel tempering Monte Carlo has proven to be an efficient method in optimization and sampling applications. Having an optimized temperature set enhances the efficiency of the algorithm through more-frequent replica visits to the temperature limits. The approaches for finding an optimal temperature set can be divided into two main categories. The methods of the first category distribute the replicas such that the swapping ratio between neighbouring replicas is constant and independent of the temperature values. The second-category techniques including the feedback-optimized method, on the other hand, aim for a temperature distribution that has higher density at simulation bottlenecks, resulting in temperature-dependent replica-exchange probabilities. In this paper, we compare the performance of various temperature setting methods on both sparse and fully-connected spin-glass problems as well as fully-connected Wishart problems that have planted solutions. These include two classes of problems that have either continuous or discontinuous phase transitions in the order parameter. Our results demonstrate that there is no performance advantage for the methods that promote nonuniform swapping probabilities on spin-glass problems where the order parameter has a smooth transition between phases at the critical temperature. However, on Wishart problems that have a first-order phase transition at low temperatures, the feedback-optimized method exhibits a time-to-solution speedup of at least a factor of two over the other approaches.
In the previous paper of this series [JCTC 2020, 16, 3757], we presented a theoretical and algorithmic framework based on a localized representation of the occupied space that exploits the inherent sparsity in the real-space evaluation of the EXX interaction in finite-gap systems. This was accompanied by a detailed description of exx, a massively parallel hybrid MPI/OpenMP implementation of this approach in Quantum ESPRESSO that enables linear-scaling hybrid DFT based AIMD in the NVE/NVT ensembles of condensed-phase systems containing 500--1000 atoms (in fixed orthorhombic cells) with a wall time cost comparable to semi-local DFT. In this work, we extend exx to enable hybrid DFT based AIMD of large-scale condensed-phase systems with general and fluctuating cells in the NpH/NpT ensembles. Our theoretical extension includes an analytical derivation of the EXX contribution to the stress tensor for systems in general cells with a computational complexity that scales linearly with system size. The corresponding algorithmic extensions to exx include optimized routines that: (i) handle static/fluctuating cells with non-orthogonal lattice symmetries, (ii) solve Poissons equation in general cells via an automated selection of the auxiliary grid directions in the Natan-Kronik representation of the discrete Laplacian operator, and (iii) evaluate the EXX contribution to the stress tensor. We also critically assess the computational performance of the extended exx module across several different HPC architectures via case studies on ice Ih, II, and III as well as ambient liquid water. We find that the extended exx can evaluate the EXX contribution to the stress tensor with negligible cost (< 1%) and remains highly scalable, thereby bringing us another step closer to routinely performing hybrid DFT based AIMD for large-scale condensed-phase systems across a wide range of thermodynamic conditions.