Accelerating all-electron ab initio simulation of raman spectra for biological systems

Raman spectroscopy provides chemical and compositional information that can serve as a structural fingerprint for various materials. Therefore, simulations of Raman spectra, including both quantum perturbation analyses and ground-state calculations are of significant interest. However, highly accurate full quantum mechanical (QM) simulations of Raman spectra have previously been confined to small systems. For large systems such as biological materials, the computational cost of full QM simulations is extremely high, and their extension to such systems remains challenging. In the work described here, by employing robust new algorithms and advances in implementation for the many-core architectures, we are able to perform fast, accurate, and massively parallel full ab initio simulations of the Raman spectra of biological systems with excellent strong and weak scaling, thereby providing a starting point for applying QM approaches to structural studies of such systems.