[MMTK] Partial energy computation

[Dmitriy Morozov]

Dear Konrad,

Thank you for your reply, and thank you and my best complements 
on such a great library. 

As for my question, while your advice does explain the 4 times 
increase in the intersubset calculations, it does not explain 
why it takes so long to compute the terms within the subset (as 
well as the new timing for the intersubset calculations). The 
adjusted code (that performs 1+20 energy evaluations (and times 
the 20)) is attached. It's output is:

2539.67 + 2753.09 + -299.20 = 4993.56
Time as a whole 18.6157569885
Time for the first set 12.9738460779
Time for the second set 15.5259660482
Time for between the sets 19.7227729559

Is the problem with using Collections for subsets? Is there any 
other way to describe subsets? 

What I'm trying to do is to split the work for computing the 
total energy of the system across multiple (a lot for a large 
system) processors by assigning each processor to compute the 
contributions to the energy due to a subset of atoms. 
Intuitively I expect to have a speedup on the order of P (P 
being the number of processors) - assuming a correct (even) 
split - for an individual energy computation (not the first one, 
but for the rest of them - i.e., discounting initialization). 
However, I'm getting something different - if just the energy 
due to the interactions between only half of the atoms takes 
almost as long to compute as the whole system, I don't have much 
hope for an order P speedup (or any speedup for that matter). 

I also want to perturb the system along the way (basically do a 
Monte-Carlo simulation), so I don't know how that affects the 
internal structures that MMTK maintains (reading internals will 
be my next step). So, I would appreciate your opinion? Do you 
think this (splitting energy computation between the processors) 
is doable? Is it doable with MMTK?

As a separate question, in Universe.energyEvaluator() I notice 
that it saves an instance of ForceField.EnergyEvaluator in 
_evaluator dictionary (that's a hashtable, right?) with subsets 
as keys - how does it hash subsets? Perturbations won't affect 
the hash, will they?

Thank you in advance for your reply.

Best,
Dmitriy

On Wednesday 19 November 2003 03:33 pm, you wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 November 2003 19:25, Dmitriy Morozov wrote:
> > Why does the following happen? When I run the code
> > (attached) the time that it takes to compute the energy for
> > each half of the atoms of the protein is almost the same as
> > for the whole protein, and the time that it takes to compute
> > the energy for
>
> In your script, you calculate each energy only once. In the
> first call for each subsystem, the internal data structures
> (list of bond and angle terms, Lennard-Jones parameters, etc.)
> are set up, which is a rather expensive procedure. What you
> are measuring is probably just that.
>
> To get a more realistic measure for repeated energy
> evaluations, calculate each energy twice in sequence and
> measure the time for the second evaluation.
>
> Konrad.
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