[gmx-users] Electrostatic interactions and atoms with nul charge

Mark Abraham Mark.Abraham at anu.edu.au
Tue Jun 5 11:16:39 CEST 2012


On 5/06/2012 6:46 PM, Laurence Leherte wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Thank you very much for your reply.  I actually carried out very basic 
> MDs of a peptide in vacuum (no pbc, cut-off for electrostatics and vdw 
> = "infinity", niter = 10^6). The computing results are given in the 
> two tables below.  As they are identical, I am assuming that there is 
> only one neighbor list that is created for the calculation of both the 
> electrostatic and vdW interactions.

Those settings trigger a different kind of non-bonded kernel from ones 
normally used in explicit solvent calculations. These kernels apparently 
don't bother to construct Q-only or LJ-only versions. It's probably not 
worthwhile for only a handful of atoms in the whole system.

>   Since I want to calculate all vdW terms, I suppose that all Coulomb 
> terms are automatically calculated too.  Am I right ?
>
>
> What if I create a group with all the nul-charge atoms and, by some 
> means (e.g., a different fudgeQQ value - or something else- for that 
> group ???), avoid to compute the electrostatic interactions with all 
> the other charges particules ?
>
>
> Similarly to the problem I reported in my mail, I also want to add 
> some kind of charged virtual sites.  In that case, those sites should 
> not contribute to the vdW interactions of the system.  I found no 
> problem at all to define such virtual sites and to carry out MD 
> simulations, but I suspect vdW terms to be calculated even if epsilon 
> and sigma are set equal to zero for such "particles".

Yes, but the whole thing is so cheap it's not worth thinking about.

Mark

> Thank you in advance for any help
>
> Laurence
>
>
>
> For the regular MD (all atoms bear a non-zero charge) :
> Computing:                               M-Number         M-Flops  % Flops
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  All-vs-All, Coul + LJ                19404.019404      737352.737    72.1
>  Outer nonbonded loop                   197.000197        1970.002     0.2
>  1,4 nonbonded interactions             518.000518       46620.047     4.6
>  Bonds                                  105.000105        6195.006     0.6
>  Angles                                 363.000363       60984.061     6.0
>  Propers                                674.000674      154346.154    15.1
>  Virial                                  24.200242         435.604     0.0
>  Stop-CM                                 19.700197         197.002     0.0
>  Calc-Ekin                              197.000394        5319.011     0.5
>  Lincs                                   96.000288        5760.017     0.6
>  Lincs-Mat                              468.001404        1872.006     0.2
>  Constraint-V                           192.000384        1536.003     0.2
>  Constraint-Vir                           9.600096         230.402     0.0
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Total                                                 1022818.053   100.0
>
>
> For the modified system (most of the atoms, i.e. 169 over 197, bear a 
> nul charge) :
> Computing:                               M-Number         M-Flops  % Flops
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  All-vs-All, Coul + LJ                19404.019404      737352.737    72.1
>  Outer nonbonded loop                   197.000197        1970.002     0.2
>  1,4 nonbonded interactions             518.000518       46620.047     4.6
>  Bonds                                  105.000105        6195.006     0.6
>  Angles                                 363.000363       60984.061     6.0
>  Propers                                674.000674      154346.154    15.1
>  Virial                                  24.200242         435.604     0.0
>  Stop-CM                                 19.700197         197.002     0.0
>  Calc-Ekin                              197.000394        5319.011     0.5
>  Lincs                                   96.000288        5760.017     0.6
>  Lincs-Mat                              468.001404        1872.006     0.2
>  Constraint-V                           192.000384        1536.003     0.2
>  Constraint-Vir                           9.600096         230.402     0.0
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Total                                                 1022818.053   100.0
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
> On 04/06/2012 16:37, Mark Abraham wrote:
>> On 5/06/2012 12:08 AM, Laurence Leherte wrote:
>>> Dear Gromacs users,
>>>
>>> I am using the Amber99 FF in MD simulations of peptides (and 
>>> proteins). In a first stage to the design a different charge 
>>> distribution, most of the atomic charges were set equal to zero 
>>> (i.e., all charges but the C and O backbone atoms).
>>> It appeared that the calculation times observed for the original 
>>> all-atom charges and the modified system are similar.
>>>
>>> My question is thus the following one.  In order to save calculation 
>>> time (and whatever the FF is), how is it possible to avoid that the 
>>> atoms bearing a nul charge are considered in electrostatic 
>>> calculations ?  I should specify here that I want these atoms to be 
>>> considered in the vdW non-bonding interactions.
>>
>> IIRC GROMACS neighbour searching already identifies atoms with zero 
>> charge and/or LJ parameters and uses non-bonded code that does not 
>> compute contributions that are known to be zero. You should be able 
>> to see this from the differences in the flop accounting at the end of 
>> your .log files when you have different numbers of zero-charge atoms. 
>> If the total calculation times are similar, then the number of atoms 
>> for which time was saved was negligible. This would be normal for a 
>> peptide in a much larger quantity of water. You will have to judge 
>> the truth of this from the timing and flop breakdown at the end of 
>> the .log file.
>>
>> Mark
>
>
> -- 
>
>
> Laurence Leherte
> Laboratoire de Physico-Chimie Informatique
> Unité de Chimie Physique Théorique et Structurale
> Facultés Universitaires Notre-Dame de la Paix (University of Namur)
> Rue de Bruxelles, 61
> B-5000 Namur
> Belgique (Belgium)
>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://maillist.sys.kth.se/pipermail/gromacs.org_gmx-users/attachments/20120605/41e65a44/attachment.html>


More information about the gromacs.org_gmx-users mailing list