A group of physicists from the Nuclear Physics Research Institute of Moscow State University demonstrated a method that allows us to carry out calculations of complex equations of quantum mechanics on a simple personal computer, for which powerful supercomputers are used today. In this case, the calculations performed on a personal computer managed to carry out faster. The article "Fast GPU-based calculations in few-body quantum scattering", setting forth the principle and the results obtained, was published by the authors in one of the last issues of the highly authoritative scientific publication
Computer Physics Communications .

To solve the most complicated equations of quantum mechanics, solved up to this point with the help of powerful and expensive supercomputers, scientists from the Moscow State University named after MV Lomonosov managed to use a personal computer with a graphics processor. According to the lead author of the work, Vladimir Kukulin, his group was able to demonstrate that the personal laboratory computer with specialized software coped with the tasks many times faster: in 15 minutes he completed the work that the supercomputer spends 2-3 days.
The equations mentioned above were formulated as early as the 60s of the last century by the Russian mathematician Ludwig Faddeev and described the scattering process of several quantum particles, that is, they represented a kind of quantum-mechanical analog of the newtonian theory of three bodies. Soon, these equations formed the basis of a whole field of quantum mechanics called the physics of few-particle systems.
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According to scientists associated with advanced research in quantum mechanics, this area is of particular interest, and the main task facing them was to find ways to solve these equations. At the same time, due to the incredible complexity of the calculations, scientists did not succeed in approaching the final goal for a long time. Only the appearance of supercomputers helped to reverse the situation and get closer to solving the problem.
A fundamentally different approach to calculations was demonstrated by a group of researchers from the Research Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Moscow State University (MV Lomonosov Moscow State University Research Institute of Nuclear Physics). The computational algorithm proposed by scientists was proposed to be run on a laboratory personal computer equipped with an Nvidia graphics chip for gaming consoles. At the same time, according to the first author of the article, the head of the laboratory of the theory of the atomic nucleus, Professor Vladimir Kukulin, the processor used in the calculations does not claim to be a premium segment and is freely sold in the store for $ 300-500.
The key problem faced by those who try to solve the scattering equations of several quantum particles is the compilation of a “core” - a large-scale two-dimensional table of tens of millions of rows and columns. At the same time, each cell of such a nucleus, in itself, is the result of complex calculations. Such a table can withstand a figurative comparison with a screen with hundreds of trillions of pixels, but it is quite amenable to build with the use of a powerful graphics processor. Using the software developed in Nvidia and programs of their own design, scientists were able to divide the calculations into 65 thousand streams, which together allowed us to solve the problem posed.
“We have achieved a speed that we did not expect ourselves,” Vladimir Kukulin shares his impressions. - The program works in such a way that 260 million complex integrals on the desktop computer count in three seconds. And no comparison with supercomputers! My colleague from the University of Tübingen, whose laboratory does the same thing, calculates using the BLUEGENE supercomputer, which is actually very expensive. And what he achieves in two or three days, we do in 15 minutes, without spending a single penny. ”
The practical value of the proposed method of calculation is that graphics processors of the required performance and software allowing to set and effectively solve problems of this scale have been around for a long time, but in the West no one used them for such calculations, preferring supercomputers.
“This work, in our opinion, opens up entirely new ways in analyzing nuclear and resonant chemical reactions,” says Vladimir Kukulin. “It can also be very useful for solving a large number of computational problems in plasma physics, geophysics, electrodynamics, medicine, and many other areas of science. We want to organize something like training courses, where researchers of various scientific fields from peripheral universities, who do not have access to supercomputers, could learn how to do the same thing that we did on our personal computers. ”
Original publication on the Institute of Nuclear Physics MSU website pagePublication in Computer Physics Communications
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