Computer Engineering Commons^™

Accelerating Quantum Monte Carlo Simulations With Emerging Architectures, Akila Gothandaraman

Doctoral Dissertations

Scientific computing applications demand ever-increasing performance while traditional microprocessor architectures face limits. Recent technological advances have led to a number of emerging computing platforms that provide one or more of the following over their predecessors: increased energy efficiency, programmability/flexibility, different granularities of parallelism, and higher numerical precision support. This dissertation explores emerging platforms such as reconfigurable computing using fieldprogrammable gate arrays (FPGAs), and graphics processing units (GPUs) for quantum Monte Carlo (QMC), a simulation method widely used in physics and physical chemistry. This dissertation makes the following significant contributions to computational science. First, we develop an open-source userfriendly hardware-accelerated simulation …