cuNNQS-SCI: A Fully GPU-Accelerated Framework for High-Performance Configuration Interaction Selection with Neural Network Quantum States
This work addresses scalability bottlenecks in NNQS-SCI for solving the Schrödinger equation in many-body systems, enabling larger-scale simulations.
cuNNQS-SCI introduces a fully GPU-accelerated framework for configuration interaction selection with neural network quantum states, achieving up to 2.32x end-to-end speedup over the baseline on 64 GPUs while preserving chemical accuracy and maintaining over 90% parallel efficiency in strong scaling.
AI-driven methods have demonstrated considerable success in tackling the central challenge of accurately solving the Schrödinger equation for complex many-body systems. Among neural network quantum state (NNQS) approaches, the NNQS-SCI (Selected Configuration Interaction) method stands out as a state-of-the-art technique, recognized for its high accuracy and scalability. However, its application to larger systems is severely constrained by a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. Specifically, centralized CPU-based global de-duplication creates a severe scalability barrier due to communication bottlenecks, while host-resident coupled-configuration generation induces prohibitive computational overheads. We introduce cuNNQS-SCI, a fully GPU-accelerated SCI framework designed to overcome these bottlenecks. cuNNQS-SCI first integrates a distributed, load-balanced global de-duplication algorithm to minimize redundancy and communication overhead at scale. To address compute limitations, it employs specialized, fine-grained CUDA kernels for exact coupled configuration generation. Finally, to break the single-GPU memory barrier exposed by this full acceleration, it incorporates a GPU memory-centric runtime featuring GPU-side pooling, streaming mini-batches, and overlapped offloading. This design enables much larger configuration spaces and shifts the bottleneck from host-side limitations back to on-device inference. Our evaluation demonstrates that cuNNQS-SCI fundamentally expands the scale of solvable problems. On an NVIDIA A100 cluster with 64 GPUs, cuNNQS-SCI achieves up to 2.32X end-to-end speedup over the highly-optimized NNQS-SCI baseline while preserving the same chemical accuracy. Furthermore, it demonstrates excellent distributed performance, maintaining over 90% parallel efficiency in strong scaling tests.