Dresden 2017 – scientific programme
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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik
O 30: Electronic Structure Theory: New Concepts and Developments in Density Functional Theory and Beyond - III
O 30.4: Talk
Tuesday, March 21, 2017, 11:30–11:45, GER 38
Large-scale cubic-scaling RPA correlation energy calculations using a Gaussian basis — •Jan Wilhelm and Jürg Hutter — University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zurich, Switzerland
The random phase approximation (RPA) for computing the electron correlation energy has emerged as an accurate tool for predicting the properties of molecules and condensed phase systems. RPA combines a number of attractive features, most importantly that long-range van der Waals interaction is included, in contrast to semilocal density functionals. The drawback connected with RPA is the computational cost: For canonical implementations of RPA, the numerical effort grows as quickly as O(N4) with the system size N. We present an algorithm for computing the RPA correlation energy in a Gaussian basis requiring O(N3) operations and O(N2) memory. The cubic-scaling RPA method is based on the resolution of the identity (RI) with the overlap metric, a reformulation of RI-RPA in the Gaussian basis and imaginary time as well as the use of sparse linear algebra. We report a massively parallel implementation which is the key for the application to large systems. As first benchmark of the method, we show the RPA correlation energy of thousands of water molecules in a high-quality cc-TZVP basis. For a comparison, the canonical RPA method is restricted to 500 water molecules using the whole Piz Daint supercomputer for two hours. Our RPA algorithm enables the application of RPA to large systems where van der Waals interactions play an important role, e.g. for predicting the adsorption energy of large molecules on surfaces.