Internally funded project
Start date : 01.01.2006
End date : 31.12.2014
The development of efficient tools to calculate the electronic structure of molecules as well as extended systems on an ab initio level greatly enlarged the importance of theoretical simulation methods for fields like new materials research, catalysis or nanotechnology.
The majority of modern computer codes for large-scale systems are based on the expansion of electronic wavefunctions and densities in terms of plane waves. However, since some of the necessary integrals are evaluated in Fourier space but others can only be calculated in real space, the 3D-FFT is heavily used to transform back and forth. This leads to complications for the parallelization of the approach for massively parallel computer systems. The goal of this project is to provide a fast, parallel multigrid solver that deals with these problems.
Special problems in the development of these multigrid solvers include the efficient handling of open boundary conditions as well as adapted higher-order methods for the treatment of PDEs with variable and jumping coefficients.