We explore how strategies to simulate various phenomena of electronic systems have been implemented in the Octopus code, using the versatility and performance of real-space grids.

Octopus is a general-purpose density-functional theory (DFT) code, with a particular emphasis on the time-dependent version of DFT (TDDFT). In this paper we present the ongoing efforts to achieve the parallelization of octopus. We focus on the real-time variant of TDDFT, where the time-dependent Kohn-Sham equations are directly propagated in time. This approach has great potential for execution in massively parallel systems such as modern supercomputers with thousands of processors and graphics processing units (GPUs). For harvesting the potential of conventional supercomputers, the main strategy is a multi-level parallelization scheme that combines the inherent scalability of real-time TDDFT with a real-space grid domain-partitioning approach. A scalable Poisson solver is critical for the efficiency of this scheme. For GPUs, we show how using blocks of Kohn-Sham states provides the required level of data parallelism and that this strategy is also applicable for code optimization on standard processors. Our results show that real-time TDDFT, as implemented in octopus, can be the method of choice for studying the excited states of large molecular systems in modern parallel architectures.

A new “on the fly” method to perform Born-Oppenheimer ab initio molecular dynamics (AIMD) simulations is presented. Inspired by Ehrenfest dynamics in time-dependent density functional theory, the electronic orbitals are evolved by a Schrödinger-like equation, where the orbital time derivative is multiplied by a parameter. This parameter controls the time scale of the fictitious electronic motion and speeds up the calculations with respect to standard Ehrenfest dynamics. In contrast with other methods, wave function orthogonality needs not be imposed as it is automatically preserved, which is of paramount relevance for large-scale AIMD simulations.

The authors present an efficient perturbative method to obtain both static and dynamic polarizabilities and hyperpolarizabilities of complex electronic systems. This approach is based on the solution of a frequency-dependent Sternheimer equation, within the formalism of time-dependent density functional theory, and allows the calculation of the response both in resonance and out of resonance. Furthermore, the excellent scaling with the number of atoms opens the way to the investigation of response properties of very large molecular systems. To demonstrate the capabilities of this method, they implemented it in a real-space (basis-set-free) code and applied it to benchmark molecules, namely, CO, ${\mathrm{H}}_2\mathrm{O}$ , and para-nitroaniline. Their results are in agreement with experimental and previous theoretical studies and fully validate their approach.