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LAMMPS-KOKKOS: Performance Portable Molecular Dynamics Across Exascale Architectures

Published: August 19, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2508.13523v1

By: Anders Johansson , Evan Weinberg , Christian R. Trott and more

BigTech Affiliations: NVIDIA

Potential Business Impact:

Makes computer simulations run much faster.

Since its inception in 1995, LAMMPS has grown to be a world-class molecular dynamics code, with thousands of users, over one million lines of code, and multi-scale simulation capabilities. We discuss how LAMMPS has adapted to the modern heterogeneous computing landscape by integrating the Kokkos performance portability library into the existing C++ code. We investigate performance portability of simple pairwise, many-body reactive, and machine-learned force-field interatomic potentials. We present results on GPUs across different vendors and generations, and analyze performance trends, probing FLOPS throughput, memory bandwidths, cache capabilities, and thread-atomic operation performance. Finally, we demonstrate strong scaling on all current US exascale machines -- OLCF Frontier, and ALCF Aurora, and NNSA El Capitan -- for the three potentials.

Country of Origin
🇺🇸 United States

Page Count
14 pages

Category
Computer Science:
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing