[QE-users] time consuming band structure calculation for a supercell

Tobias Klöffel tobias.kloeffel at fau.de
Mon Dec 14 11:18:25 CET 2020


Hello Zahra,

why do you use PAW and 100Ry wfc cutoff?

Kind regards,

On 12/14/20 11:13 AM, Zahra Khatibi wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Sure. I've shared the input and output in the following link:
> https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1trdcWUw7GKSw0zLQouxygpaKwOl7_2KM?usp=sharing 
> <https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1trdcWUw7GKSw0zLQouxygpaKwOl7_2KM?usp=sharing>
>
> Kind regards,
>
> On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 5:01 PM Lorenzo Paulatto <paulatz at gmail.com 
> <mailto:paulatz at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>
>>     Aslo I have tried running the band calculation on different
>>     systems (local pc with 12 nodes) and HPC (with 36 and 72 nodes).
>>     Every time I have the same problem. I have tried QE 6.5 and 6.4
>>     for this calculation all with same issue.
>
>
>     For comparison, I have here a calculation with 119 electrons, 10
>     k-points, 100 Ry kinetic energy cutoff. One SCF iteration takes
>     about 5 seconds on 32 CPUs (2 nodes of a very old computing
>     cluster that has since been retired). From 120 to 190 electrons
>     there should be around a factor 4 of CPU times. But it would be
>     easier to say which is the source of the discrepancy if you sent
>     your input and output files to teh list, to have a look
>
>
>     cheers
>
>
>>
>>     All the best,
>>     Zahra
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Fri, Dec 11, 2020, 22:22 Lorenzo Paulatto <paulatz at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:paulatz at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         Hello Zahra,
>>
>>         if I understand correctly, you manage to do the scf
>>         calculation, but then the band calculation is very slow. The
>>         cost per k-point of nscf should be more or less the same as
>>         the cost per k-point of one scf iteration. If it is not,
>>         there is something wrong. One possible problem, is that
>>         ecutwfc is interpreted differently during nscf. A tight value
>>         (1.d-12 or less) may cause the threshold of diagonalization
>>         in nscf to become too small and very slow to converge. This
>>         should be fixed in v 6.7, but you can just increase ecutwfc
>>         in nscf if you're using a previous version.
>>
>>         If not, it may be a problem with parallelism, i.e. running on
>>         too many CPUs or some proper human error like running with
>>         all the processes on the same computing node.
>>
>>
>>         cheers
>>
>>         On 2020-12-11 19:25, Zahra Khatibi wrote:
>>>         Dear all,
>>>
>>>         First of all, I hope everyone is safe and well in these
>>>         crazy times.
>>>         I'm calculating the electronic band dispersion of a 2D
>>>         heterostructure with a 59 atom unit cell. This system is a
>>>         small bandgap (10-20 meV) semiconductor. The number of
>>>         valence bands is (valence electrons/2) 181. When I set
>>>         'nbnd' to 190, the band structure calculation costs me 30
>>>         minutes for each k point on HPC with 72 processors. This
>>>         means that if I do a simple band calculation for a high
>>>         symmetry path with 100 points within, I have to wait almost
>>>         50 hours! This even becomes worst when I try to evaluate the
>>>         band dispersion with SOC switched on (twice the spin
>>>         degenerate band calculation).
>>>         Since the band dispersion evaluation is the major part of
>>>         our study, I was wondering if there is a way around this
>>>         problem, like reducing the number of bands by only looking
>>>         at energy interval close to Fermi energy?
>>>         I could see that there are lots of papers and studies in the
>>>         literature with huge unit cells and heavy atoms that have
>>>         presented numerous band structures (using QE). So I really
>>>         appreciate it if you could help me here.
>>>
>>>         Kind regards,
>>>         --
>>>         Z. Khatibi
>>>         School of Physics
>>>         Trinity College Dublin
>>>
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-- 
M.Sc. Tobias Klöffel
=======================================================
HPC (High Performance Computing) group
Erlangen Regional Computing Center(RRZE)
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Martensstr. 1
91058 Erlangen

Room: 1.133
Phone: +49 (0) 9131 / 85 - 20101

=======================================================

E-mail: tobias.kloeffel at fau.de

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