Multilevel Parallelism in Computational Chemistry using Common Component Architecture and Global Arrays

The development of complex scientific applications for high-end systems is a challenging task. Addressing complexity of the involved software and algorithms is becoming increasingly difficult and requires appropriate software engineering approaches to address interoperability, maintenance, and software composition challenges. At the same time, the requirements for performance and scalability to thousand processor configurations magnifies the level of difficulties facing the scientific programmer due to the variable levels of parallelism available in different algorithms or functional modules of the application. This paper demonstrates how the Common Component Architecture (CCA) and Global Arrays (GA) can be used in context of computational chemistry to express and manage multi-level parallelism through the use of processor groups. For example, the numerical Hessian calculation using three levels of parallelism in NWChem computational chemistry package outperformed the original version of the NWChem code based on single level parallelism by a factor of 90% when running on 256 processors.

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