Dr Joseph Barker from the Institute for Materials Research, Tohoku University, Japan, has given a research seminar as part of his visit to the University of Southampton this week.
Atomistic spin dynamics (ASD) is often used when considering temperature dependent effects need to be combined with dynamics in magnetic materials. The use of stochastic dynamics along with long range interactions from ab initio parameterisation leads to a heavy computational cost. The accurate modelling of physical properties such as the spin wave spectrum or diffusion coefficients requires large systems and long integration times, thus a high speed implementation of ASD is of great value.
Joe reported his work that started 5 years ago and is using GPUs to accelerate ASD calculations, leading to great speed benefit. GPU technology, both hardware and software has moved on greatly since then, but the underlying principles of optimizing for a GPU remain the same. This talk covered a basic introduction to ASD and GPUs, combined with results and interesting physics which highlight the advantages the increase in calculation speed has provided.
Posted by Hans Fangohr