REDUCED VARIABLE MOLECULAR-DYNAMICS

This article describes an extension to previously developed constraint techniques. These enhanced constraint methods will enable the study of large computational chemistry problems that cannot be easily handled with current constrained molecular dynamics (MD) methods. These methods are based on an O(N) solution to the constrained equations of motion. The benefits of this approach are that (1) the system constraints are solved exactly at each time step, (2) the solution algorithm is noniterative, (3) the algorithm is recursive and scales as O(N), (4) the algorithm is numerically stable, (5) the algorithm is highly amenable to parallel processing, and (6) potentially greater integration step sizes are possible. It is anticipated that application of this methodology will provide a 10- to 100-improvement in the speed of a large molecular trajectory as compared with the time required to run a conventional atomistic unconstrained simulation. It is, therefore, anticipated that this methodology will provide an enabling capacity for pursuing the drug discovery process for large molecular systems. (C) 1995 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.