Performance improvements¶
Dynamic pairlist generation for energy minimization¶
With energy minimization, the pairlist, and domain decomposition when running in parallel, is now performed when at least one atom has moved more than the half the pairlist buffer size. The pairlist used to be constructed every step.
Nonbonded free-energy kernels use SIMD¶
Free energy calculation performance is improved by making the nonbonded free-energy kernels SIMD accelerated. On AVX2-256 these kernels are 4 to 8 times as fast. This should give a noticeable speed-up for most systems, especially if the perturbed interaction calculations were a bottleneck. This is particularly the case when using GPUs, where the performance improvement of free-energy runs is up to a factor of 3.