Solving the electronic structure problem for over 100,000 atoms in real-space

Abstract

Using a real-space high order finite-difference approach, we investigate the electronic structure of large spherical silicon nanoclusters. Within Kohn-Sham density functional theory and using pseudopotentials, we report the self-consistent field convergence of a system with over 100,000 atoms: a Si(107,641)H(9,084) nanocluster with a diameter of 16 nm. Our approach uses Chebyshev-filtered subspace iteration to speed-up the convergence of the eigenspace, and blockwise Hilbert space filling curves to speed-up sparse matrix-vector multiplications, all of which is implemented in the PARSEC code. For the largest system, we utilized 2048 nodes (114,688 processors) on the Frontera machine in the Texas Advanced Computing Center. Our quantitative analysis of the electronic structure shows how it gradually approaches its bulk counterpart as a function of the nanocluster size. The band gap is enlarged due to quantum confinement in nanoclusters, but decreases as the system size increases, as expected. Our work serves as a proof-of-concept for the capacity of the real-space approach in efficiently parallelizing very large calculations using high performance computer platforms, which can straightforwardly be replicated in other systems with more than $10^5$ atoms.