Improved Modularity and New Features in ipie: Towards Even Larger AFQMC Calculations on CPUs and GPUs at Zero and Finite Temperatures

ipie is a Python-based auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFQMC) package that has undergone substantial improvements since its initial release [J. Chem. Theory Comput., 2022, 19(1): 109-121]. This paper outlines the improved modularity and new capabilities implemented in ipie. We highlight the ease of incorporating different trial and walker types and the seamless integration of ipie with external libraries. We enable distributed Hamiltonian simulations, allowing for multi-GPU simulations of large systems. This development enabled us to compute the interaction energy of a benzene dimer with 84 electrons and 1512 orbitals, which otherwise would not have fit on a single GPU. We also support GPU-accelerated multi-slater determinant trial wavefunctions [arXiv:2406.08314] to enable efficient and highly accurate simulations of large-scale systems. This allows for near-exact ground state energies of multi-reference clusters, [Cu$_2$O$_2$]$^{2+}$ and [Fe$_2$S$_2$(SCH$_3$)]$^{2-}$. We also describe implementations of free projection AFQMC, finite temperature AFQMC, AFQMC for electron-phonon systems, and automatic differentiation in AFQMC for calculating physical properties. These advancements position ipie as a leading platform for AFQMC research in quantum chemistry, facilitating more complex and ambitious computational method development and their applications.
Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures