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Ab initio molecular dynamics simulations with hybrid density functionals have so far found little application due to their computational cost. In this work, an implementation of the Hartree–Fock exchange is presented that is specifically targeted at ab initio molecular dynamics simulations of medium sized systems. We demonstrate that our implementation, which is available as part of the CP2K/Quickstep program, is robust and efficient. Several prescreening techniques lead to a linear scaling cost for integral evaluation and storage. Integral compression techniques allow for in-core calculations on systems containing several thousand basis functions. The massively parallel implementation respects integral symmetry and scales up to hundreds of CPUs using a dynamic load balancing scheme. A time-reversible multiple time step scheme, exploiting the difference in computational efficiency between hybrid and local functionals, brings further time savings. With extensive simulations of liquid water, we demonstrate the ability to perform, for several tens of picoseconds, ab initio molecular dynamics based on hybrid functionals of systems in the condensed phase containing a few thousand Gaussian basis functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The calculation of Hartree-Fock exchange (HFX) is computationally demanding for large systems described with high-quality basis sets. In this work, we show that excellent performance and good accuracy can nevertheless be obtained if an auxiliary density matrix is employed for the HFX calculation. Several schemes to derive an auxiliary density matrix from a high-quality density matrix are discussed. Key to the accuracy of the auxiliary density matrix methods (ADMM) is the use of a correction based on standard generalized gradient approximations for HFX. ADMM integrates seamlessly in existing HFX codes and, in particular, can be employed in linear scaling implementations. Demonstrating the performance of the method, the effect of HFX on the structure of liquid water is investigated in detail using Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics simulations (300 ps) of a system of 64 molecules. Representative for large systems are calculations on a solvated protein (Rubredoxin), for which ADMM outperforms the corresponding standard HFX implementation by approximately a factor 20.

Hartree-Fock exchange with a truncated Coulomb operator has recently been discussed in the context of periodic plane-waves calculations [Spencer, J.; Alavi, A. Phys. Rev. B: Solid State, 2008, 77, 193110]. In this work, this approach is extended to Gaussian basis sets, leading to a stable and accurate procedure for evaluating Hartree-Fock exchange at the Γ-point. Furthermore, it has been found that standard hybrid functionals can be transformed into short-range functionals without loss of accuracy. The well-defined short-range nature of the truncated exchange operator can naturally be exploited in integral screening procedures and makes this approach interesting for both condensed phase and gas phase systems. The presented Hartree-Fock implementation is massively parallel and scales up to ten thousands of cores. This makes it feasible to perform highly accurate calculations on systems containing thousands of atoms or ten thousands of basis functions. The applicability of this scheme is demonstrated by calculating the cohesive energy of a LiH crystal close to the Hartree-Fock basis set limit and by performing an electronic structure calculation of a complete protein (rubredoxin) in solution with a large and flexible basis set.