Enabling AI Deep Potentials for Ab Initio-quality Molecular Dynamics Simulations in GROMACS

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Andong, Pennati, Luca, Markidis, Stefano, Peng, Ivy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Hu, Andong
Pennati, Luca
Markidis, Stefano
Peng, Ivy
author_facet Hu, Andong
Pennati, Luca
Markidis, Stefano
Peng, Ivy
contents State-of-the-art AI deep potentials provide ab initio-quality results, but at a fraction of the computational cost of first-principles quantum mechanical calculations, such as density functional theory. In this work, we bring AI deep potentials into GROMACS, a production-level Molecular Dynamics (MD) code, by integrating with DeePMD-kit that provides domain-specific deep learning (DL) models of interatomic potential energy and force fields. In particular, we enable AI deep potentials inference across multiple DP model families and DL backends by coupling GROMACS Neural Network Potentials with the C++/CUDA backend in DeePMD-kit. We evaluate two recent large-atom-model architectures, DPA2 that is based on the attention mechanism and DPA3 that is based on GNN, in GROMACS using four ab initio-quality protein-in-water benchmarks (1YRF, 1UBQ, 3LZM, 2PTC) on NVIDIA A100 and GH200 GPUs. Our results show that DPA2 delivers up to 4.23x and 3.18x higher throughput than DPA3 on A100 and GH200 GPUs, respectively. We also provide a characterization study to further contrast DPA2 and DPA3 in throughput, memory usage, and kernel-level execution on GPUs. Our findings identify kernel-launch overhead and domain-decomposed inference as the main optimization priorities for AI deep potentials in production MD simulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02234
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enabling AI Deep Potentials for Ab Initio-quality Molecular Dynamics Simulations in GROMACS
Hu, Andong
Pennati, Luca
Markidis, Stefano
Peng, Ivy
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
State-of-the-art AI deep potentials provide ab initio-quality results, but at a fraction of the computational cost of first-principles quantum mechanical calculations, such as density functional theory. In this work, we bring AI deep potentials into GROMACS, a production-level Molecular Dynamics (MD) code, by integrating with DeePMD-kit that provides domain-specific deep learning (DL) models of interatomic potential energy and force fields. In particular, we enable AI deep potentials inference across multiple DP model families and DL backends by coupling GROMACS Neural Network Potentials with the C++/CUDA backend in DeePMD-kit. We evaluate two recent large-atom-model architectures, DPA2 that is based on the attention mechanism and DPA3 that is based on GNN, in GROMACS using four ab initio-quality protein-in-water benchmarks (1YRF, 1UBQ, 3LZM, 2PTC) on NVIDIA A100 and GH200 GPUs. Our results show that DPA2 delivers up to 4.23x and 3.18x higher throughput than DPA3 on A100 and GH200 GPUs, respectively. We also provide a characterization study to further contrast DPA2 and DPA3 in throughput, memory usage, and kernel-level execution on GPUs. Our findings identify kernel-launch overhead and domain-decomposed inference as the main optimization priorities for AI deep potentials in production MD simulations.
title Enabling AI Deep Potentials for Ab Initio-quality Molecular Dynamics Simulations in GROMACS
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Chemical Physics
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02234