On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 2:40 PM, <jfloresc.andrew.cmu.edu> wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I am implementing an extra non-bonded list of only solute-solute atom
> interactions. My purpose is to scale down solute-solute direct
> electrostatic interactions in PMEMD MPI (Amber 12). My first attempt has
> been to add a new non-bonded list called gbl_ipairs_solute in the module
> nb_pairlist. Then I modified the subroutine get_nb_list in the same module
> by adding if-else sentences when the indexes of a pair of atoms are below
> or equal to the number of solute atoms.
>
> However, I have some problems with illegal access to memory. Below is a
> small part of the code (extra variables are initialized:
> ee_solute_eval_cnt = 0, full_solute_eval_cnt = 0. nsolute is the number of
> solute atoms).
I think better information would be a diff (so we can see the changes you
made) and the error message you got (even better if you could isolate
where the problem was using valgrind or gdb).
I hope you could provide me some tips of how to correct
> this or a better implementation.
>
I personally think trying to create a new pairlist is an undesirable
approach for several reasons.
1) It is complex to code (as you are discovering here), and will require a
very large amount of debugging to make sure that it is implemented
correctly in serial and parallel.
2) It adds considerably to the memory requirements of the program.
3) It requires the most intrusive changes (this goes along with 1)
4) I expect it will harm performance (perhaps significantly, unless done
'correctly' I suppose).
So you should really try and decide if doing this is necessary before
taking this route. I may misunderstand what you're trying to do, but I
think you can use the existing pairlist with only minor changes to
accomplish what you want. You can always pretty-it up later if you want to
release it, but that should come after testing and validation to determine
if it's worth spending your time.
What I would suggest is try to find a way of "tagging" particular pairs
that you want to scale. [1] Perhaps the easiest way is to tag
solute-solute pairs with negative indexes. The abs() function allows you
to easily recover the original value wherever you need to, and you have a
very simple (and computationally efficient) test to evaluate whether or not
the interaction should be scaled [ if (pair_index < 0) ]. (The compiler
should be able to figure out that it just needs to look at the sign bit to
determine truthyness...)
I'm not sure if there are many people that can give you detailed help when
coding this without spending significant (and probably unavailable) amounts
of time to familiarize themselves with the code--it was written, optimized,
and validated fairly long ago (it has not been changed significantly since
2008).
I suspect that valgrind and gdb (or idb) will be a great help if you
familiarize yourself with how to use it (particularly if you encounter
segfaults or other fatal memory violations). Valgrind is particularly nice
in terms of dealing with MPI programs and independently tracking threads.
Of course if you have access to TotalView, just use that.
Hope this helps,
Jason
[1] Don't forget that direct-space electrostatic interactions are already
scaled by erfc in Ewald sums. The use of Fourier transforms in Ewald-based
methods limits the physical relevance of pairwise electrostatic
interactions. May be something worth considering in your method.
--
Jason M. Swails
BioMaPS,
Rutgers University
Postdoctoral Researcher
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Received on Fri Sep 20 2013 - 15:30:02 PDT
