Fragment-based quantum mechanical methods for periodic systems with Ewald summation and mean image charge convention for long-range electrostatic interactions

We describe an Ewald-summation method to incorporate long-range electrostatic interactions into fragment-based electronic structure methods for periodic systems. The present method is an extension of the particle-mesh Ewald technique for combined quantum mechanical and molecular mechanical (QM/MM) calculations, and it has been implemented into the explicit polarization (X-Pol) potential to illustrate the computational details. As in the QM/MM-Ewald method, the X-Pol-Ewald approach is a linear-scaling electrostatic method, in which the short-range electrostatic interactions are determined explicitly in real space and the long-range Ewald pair potential is incorporated into the Fock matrix as a correction. To avoid the time-consuming Fock matrix update during the self-consistent field procedure, a mean image charge (MIC) approximation is introduced, in which the running average with a user-chosen correlation time is used to represent the long-range electrostatic correction as an average effect. Test simulations on liquid water show that the present X-Pol-Ewald method takes about 25% more CPU time than the usual X-Pol method using spherical cutoff, whereas the use of the MIC approximation reduces the extra costs for long-range electrostatic interactions by 15%. The present X-Pol-Ewald method provides a general procedure for incorporating long-range electrostatic effects into fragment-based electronic structure methods for treating biomolecular and condensed-phase systems under periodic boundary conditions.     

Fast and accurate method for summation of divergent series

We develop a particular case of algebraic approximants for the summation of divergent power series and for the continuation of such expansions beyond their radius of convergence. The calculation of bound states and resonances for one‐ and two‐dimensional anharmonic oscillators, for a perturbed rigid rotor, and for the Zeeman and Stark effects in hydrogen shows that the present method is one of the most efficient ones for that purpose. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Int J Quant Chem 81: 268–279, 2001     

Ewald summation versus direct summation of shifted-force potentials for the calculation of electrostatic interactions in solids: A quantitative study

The calculated Madelung energies and Madelung forces of the electrostatic interaction for nine crystal structures are reported. The method of direct summation with two different shifted-force potentials is compared to the Ewald summation. There is a considerable difference in the convergence of the energy and the force for the two shifted-force potentials regarding the cutoff radius. The convergence depends not only on the potential itself, but also on the crystal structure. One of the shifted-force potentials used is implemented in the CHARMM force field. The energy calculated with this potential shows a good convergence for small cutoff radii. With the other shifted-force potential, the force shows a better convergence for small cutoff radii. The number of pair interactions for obtaining the Madelung limit using the Ewald summation and the direct summation of a shifted-force potential is also reported. For complex structures like zeolites, the number of relevant pair interactions is smaller using the direct summation of a shifted-force potential. For simple structures such as cesium chloride, the number of significant pair interactions is smaller using the Ewald summation. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Errors in the Ewald summation method with electrostatic layer correction for Coulomb interactions in slab geometry

New theoretical expressions for cut-off errors in 2D reciprocal-space summation of the electrostatic layer correction (ELC) term in energy and forces are derived, and a procedure to determine optimal parameters of the method is proposed. The procedure is tested in numerical calculations for charges distributed uniformly in a cubic box and charges located in two layers near the box basis. The summation errors for conventional Ewald method can be used to find out optimal values of the convergence parameter, and real- and reciprocal-space cut-off radii, whereas the ELC errors give possibility to choose an optimal value of an empty space gap in the simulation box.     

Some comments and corrections regarding the calculation of electrostatic potential derivatives using the Ewald summation technique

A review of the literature on the calculation of electrostatic potentials, fields, and field gradients in systems consisting of charges and dipoles using the Ewald summation technique is presented. Discrepancies between the previous formulas are highlighted, and an error in the derivation of the reciprocal contributions to the electrostatic field and field gradient is corrected. The new formulas for the field and field gradient are shown to exhibit a termwise identity with the ones for the electrostatic energy.     

A modified TIP3P water potential for simulation with Ewald summation

The charges and Lennard-Jones parameters of the TIP3P water potential have been modified to improve its performance under the common condition for molecular dynamics simulations of using Ewald summation in lieu of relatively short nonbonded truncation schemes. These parameters were optimized under the condition that the hydrogen atoms do not have Lennard-Jones parameters, thus making the model independent of the combining rules used for the calculation of nonbonded, heteroatomic interaction energies, and limiting the number of Lennard-Jones calculations required. Under these conditions, this model provides accurate density (rho = 0.997 g/ml) and heat of vaporization (DeltaH(vap) = 10.53 kcal/mol) at 25 degrees C and 1 atm, but also provides improved structure in the second peak of the O-O radial distribution function and improved values for the dielectric constant (epsilon(0) = 89) and the diffusion coefficient (D = 4.0 x 10(-5) cm(2)/s) relative to the original parametrization. Like the original parameterization, however, this model does not show a temperature density maximum. Several similar models are considered with the additional constraint of trying to match the performance of the optimized potentials for liquid simulation atom force field to that obtained when using the simulation conditions under which it was originally designed, but no model was entirely satisfactory in reproducing the relative difference in free energies of hydration between the model compounds, phenol and benzene. Finally, a model that incorporates a long-range correction for truncated Lennard-Jones interactions is presented, which provides a very accurate dielectric constant (epsilon(0) = 76), however, the improvement in this estimate is on the same order as the uncertainty in the calculation.     

Fast calculation of the electrostatic potential in ionic crystals by direct summation method

An efficient real space method is derived for the evaluation of the Madelung's potential of ionic crystals. The proposed method is an extension of Evjen's method. It takes advantage of a general analysis of the potential convergence in real space. Indeed, we show that the series convergence is exponential as a function of the number of canceled multipolar moments in the unit cell. The method proposed in this work reaches such an exponential convergence rate. Its efficiency is comparable to Ewald's method. However, unlike the latter, it uses only simple algebraic functions.     

Multi-Level Ewald: A hybrid multigrid / Fast Fourier Transform approach to the electrostatic particle-mesh problem

We present a new method for decomposing the one convolution required by standard Particle-Particle Particle-Mesh (P(3)M) electrostatic methods into a series of convolutions over slab-shaped subregions of the original simulation cell. Most of the convolutions derive data from separate regions of the cell and can thus be computed independently via FFTs, in some cases with a small amount of zero padding so that the results of these sub-problems may be reunited with minimal error. A single convolution over the entire cell is also performed, but using a much coarser mesh than the original problem would have required. This "Multi-Level Ewald" (MLE) method therefore requires moderately more FFT work plus the tasks of interpolating between different sizes of mesh and accumulating the results from neighboring sub-problems, but we show that the added expense can be less than 10% of the total simulation cost. We implement MLE as an approximation to the Smooth Particle Mesh Ewald (SPME) style of P(3)M, and identify a number of tunable parameters in MLE. With reasonable settings pertaining to the degree of overlap between the various sub-problems and the accuracy of interpolation between meshes, the errors obtained by MLE can be smaller than those obtained in molecular simulations with typical SPME settings. We compare simulations of a box of water molecules performed with MLE and SPME, and show that the energy conservation, structural, and dynamical properties of the system are more affected by the accuracy of the SPME calculation itself than by the additional MLE approximation. We anticipate that the MLE method's ability to break a single convolution into many independent sub-problems will be useful for extending the parallel scaling of molecular simulations.     

Multiple "time step" Monte Carlo simulations: application to charged systems with Ewald summation

Recently, we have proposed an efficient scheme for Monte Carlo simulations, the multiple "time step" Monte Carlo (MTS-MC) [J. Chem. Phys. 117, 8203 (2002)] based on the separation of the potential interactions into two additive parts. In this paper, the structural and thermodynamic properties of the simple point charge water model combined with the Ewald sum are compared for the MTS-MC real-/reciprocal-space split of the Ewald summation and the common Metropolis Monte Carlo method. We report a number of observables as a function of CPU time calculated using MC and MTS-MC. The correlation functions indicate that speedups on the order of 4.5-7.5 can be obtained for systems of 108-500 waters for n=10 splitting parameter.     

Simple and accurate scheme to compute electrostatic interaction: Zero-dipole summation technique for molecular system and application to bulk water

The zero-dipole summation method was extended to general molecular systems, and then applied to molecular dynamics simulations of an isotropic water system. In our previous paper [I. Fukuda, Y. Yonezawa, and H. Nakamura, J. Chem. Phys. 134, 164107 (2011)], for evaluating the electrostatic energy of a classical particle system, we proposed the zero-dipole summation method, which conceptually prevents the nonzero-charge and nonzero-dipole states artificially generated by a simple cutoff truncation. Here, we consider the application of this scheme to molecular systems, as well as some fundamental aspects of general cutoff truncation protocols. Introducing an idea to harmonize the bonding interactions and the electrostatic interactions in the scheme, we develop a specific algorithm. As in the previous study, the resulting energy formula is represented by a simple pairwise function sum, enabling facile applications to high-performance computation. The accuracy of the electrostatic energies calculated by the zero-dipole summation method with the atom-based cutoff was numerically investigated, by comparison with those generated by the Ewald method. We obtained an electrostatic energy error of less than 0.01% at a cutoff length longer than 13 A for a TIP3P isotropic water system, and the errors were quite small, as compared to those obtained by conventional truncation methods. The static property and the stability in an MD simulation were also satisfactory. In addition, the dielectric constants and the distance-dependent Kirkwood factors were measured, and their coincidences with those calculated by the particle mesh Ewald method were confirmed, although such coincidences are not easily attained by truncation methods. We found that the zero damping-factor gave the best results in a practical cutoff distance region. In fact, in contrast to the zero-charge scheme, the damping effect was insensitive in the zero-charge and zero-dipole scheme, in the molecular system we treated. We discussed the origin of this difference between the two schemes and the dependence of this fact on the physical system. The use of the zero damping-factor will enhance the efficiency of practical computations, since the complementary error function is not employed. In addition, utilizing the zero damping-factor provides freedom from the parameter choice, which is not trivial in the zero-charge scheme, and eliminates the error function term, which corresponds to the time-consuming Fourier part under the periodic boundary conditions.     

Ewald summation and multiple time step methods for molecular dynamics simulation of biological molecules

Methods by which to determine conditions for a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation of biological molecules were investigated. Derivation of the optimal parameters of the Ewald summation was described so as to give same precision to the real space, the reciprocal space summations and the van der Waals interaction. Later, the procedure by which to determine the condition of the multiple time step method by RESPA (REference System Propagator Algorithm; Tuckerman et al., 1992, J. Chem. Phys., 97, 1990) was described as exemplified by MD simulations of a solvated β-sheet peptide. The conservation of the total energy in a microcanonical ensemble was measured to investigate the stability of the simulation conditions. The most feasible respective combinations of the time steps were: 0.25 fs for bond, angle and torsion interactions; 2 fs for van der Waals interaction and Ewald real-space summation; and 4 fs for Ewald reciprocal-space summation. Though it retained an acceptable accuracy, this condition accelerated the simulation ten-fold compared to that in which a simple velocity-Verlet method with a time step of 0.25 fs was used. The update of the correction term due to excluded neighbors was then investigated. Better results were obtained when the correction was updated with the real-space than when it was updated with the reciprocal-space summation. Finally, an MD simulation as long as 50 ps performed under the optimal Ewald and RESPA parameters was thus determined. The trajectory showed a good stability, indicating the feasibility of the parameters.     

Fast Ewald sums for general van der Waals potentials

This work considers ways to increase calculation speed for Ewald crystal summations in cases where standard combination rules do not apply. This also increases speed of free-energy perturbation theory calculations. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Comput Chem 18 : 1365–1370, 1997     

Molecular dynamics scheme for precise estimation of electrostatic interaction via zero-dipole summation principle

We propose a novel idea, zero-dipole summation, for evaluating the electrostatic energy of a classical particle system, and have composed an algorithm for effectively utilizing the idea for molecular dynamics. It conceptually prevents the nonzero-charge and nonzero-dipole states artificially generated by a simple cutoff truncation. The resulting energy formula is nevertheless represented by a simple pairwise function sum, which enables facile application to high-performance computation. By following a heuristic approach to derive the current electrostatic energy formula, we developed an axiomatic approach to construct the method consistently. Explorations of the theoretical details of our method revealed the structure of the generated error, and we analyzed it by comparisons with other methods. A numerical simulation using liquid sodium chloride confirmed that the current method with a small damping factor yielded sufficient accuracy with a practical cutoff distance region. The current energy function also conducts stable numerical integration in a liquid MD simulation. Our method is an extension of the charge neutralized summation developed by Wolf et al. [J. Chem. Phys. 110, 8254 (1999)]. Furthermore, we found that the current method becomes a generalization of the preaveraged potential method proposed by Yakub and Ronchi [J. Chem. Phys. 119, 11556 (2003)], which is based on a viewpoint different from the neutrality. The current study presents these relationships and suggests possibilities for their further applications.     

ICMMM2D: an accurate method to include planar dielectric interfaces via image charge summation

An extension of the MMM2D method, called ICMMM2D, is presented to deal with the electrostatic interactions in partially periodic systems that are confined along one direction by two planar dielectric interfaces. The method handles all electrostatic interactions that are induced by the presence of dielectric interfaces by an image charge method. Our method accurately treats repeated image charges under the planar dielectric interfaces as well as the periodic images that are due to the periodic boundary conditions along the other two directions. The scaling of the method with the number of charges, N, is still N5/3, and the overhead involved approximately doubles the CPU time compared to the original MMM2D method. The errors are fully under control and the error bounds can be preset up to computer accuracy.     

The ENUF method—Ewald summation based on nonuniform fast Fourier transform: Implementation,parallelization, and application

Computer simulations of model systems are widely used to explore striking phenomena in promising applications spanning from physics, chemistry, biology, to materials science and engineering. The long range electrostatic interactions between charged particles constitute a prominent factor in determining structures and states of model systems. How to efficiently calculate electrostatic interactions in simulation systems subjected to partial or full periodic boundary conditions has been a grand challenging task. In the past decades, a large variety of computational schemes has been proposed, among which the Ewald summation method is the most reliable route to accurately deal with electrostatic interactions between charged particles in simulation systems. In addition, extensive efforts have been done to improve computational efficiencies of the Ewald summation based methods. Representative examples are approaches based on cutoffs, reaction fields, multi-poles, multi-grids, and particle-mesh schemes. We sketched an ENUF method, an abbreviation for the Ewald summation method based on the nonuniform fast Fourier transform technique, and have implemented this method in particle-based simulation packages to calculate electrostatic energies and forces at micro- and mesoscopic levels. Extensive computational studies of conformational properties of polyelectrolytes, dendrimer-membrane complexes, and ionic fluids demonstrated that the ENUF method and its derivatives conserve both energy and momentum to floating point accuracy, and exhibit a computational complexity of with optimal physical parameters. These ENUF based methods are attractive alternatives in molecular simulations where high accuracy and efficiency of simulation methods are needed to accelerate calculations of electrostatic interactions at extended spatiotemporal scales.     

Fast summation boundary element method for calculating solvation free energies of macromolecules

We present a boundary element method (BEM) for calculating the reaction field energy of a macromolecule embedded in a high-dielectric medium such as water. In a BEM calculation, the key computational task is the calculation of the induced surface charge distribution at the dielectric boundary. This is obtained by solving a system of linear equations whose dimension can run into the tens of thousands for a macromolecule. In this work, we use a fast summation hierarchical multipole method to solve for the induced surface charge densities. By careful analysis of the levels of approximation required for the various terms in the calculation, we avoid the unnecessary computation of terms that contribute negligibly to the final outcome and, consequently, achieve high computational efficiency. For a protein such as BPTI with 890 atoms, the calculation of the induced surface charge density distribution and the reaction field energy was completed in 7.9 s on an SGI workstation with an R10000 CPU. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. J Comput Chem 19: 1494–1504, 1998     

Fast and accurate methods for predicting short-range constraints in protein models

Protein modeling tools utilize many kinds of structural information that may be predicted from amino acid sequence of a target protein or obtained from experiments. Such data provide geometrical constraints in a modeling process. The main aim is to generate the best possible consensus structure. The quality of models strictly depends on the imposed conditions. In this work we present an algorithm, which predicts short-range distances between Cα atoms as well as a set of short structural fragments that possibly share structural similarity with a query sequence. The only input of the method is a query sequence profile. The algorithm searches for short protein fragments with high sequence similarity. As a result a statistics of distances observed in the similar fragments is returned. The method can be used also as a scoring function or a short-range knowledge-based potential based on the computed statistics.     

Fast and accurate computation schemes for evaluating vibrational entropy of proteins

Standard normal mode analysis (NMA) method is able to calculate vibrational entropy of proteins, but it is computationally intensive, especially for large proteins. To evaluate vibrational entropy efficiently and accurately, we, here, propose computation schemes based on coarse-grained NMA methods. This can be achieved by rescaling coarse-grained results with a specific factor that is derived on the basis of the linear correlation of protein vibrational entropy between standard NMA and coarse-grained NMA. Our coarse-grained NMA computation schemes can repeat correctly and efficiently the results of standard NMA for large proteins.