Importance of Three-Body Interactions in Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Water Demonstrated with the Fragment Molecular Orbital Method

The analytic first derivative with respect to nuclear coordinates is formulated and implemented in the framework of the three-body fragment molecular orbital (FMO) method. The gradient has been derived and implemented for restricted second-order Møller–Plesset perturbation theory, as well as for both restricted and unrestricted Hartree–Fock and density functional theory. The importance of the three-body fully analytic gradient is illustrated through the failure of the two-body FMO method during molecular dynamics simulations of a small water cluster. The parallel implementation of the fragment molecular orbital method, its parallel efficiency, and its scalability on the Blue Gene/Q architecture up to 262 144 CPU cores are also discussed.