Improving the Performance of CP2K on the Cray XT
Abstract
CP2K is a freely available and increasingly popular Density Functional Theory code for the
simulation of a wide range of systems. It is heavily used on many Cray XT systems, including ‘HECToR’
in the UK and ‘Monte Rosa’ in Switzerland. We describe performance optimisations made to the code in
several key areas, including 3D Fourier Transforms, and present the implementation of a load balancing
scheme for multi-grids. These result in performance gains of around 30% on 256 cores (for a generally
representative benchmark) and up to 300% on 1024 cores (for non-homogeneous systems). Early results
from the implementation of hybrid MPI/OpenMP parallelism in the code are also presented.