ICML2026
: Fast and Accurate Coarse-Grained Neural Network Molecular Dynamics
Pingzhi Li, Hongxuan Li, Zirui Liu, Xingcheng Lin, Tianlong Chen
摘要
Graph neural network (GNN) potentials such as SchNet improve the accuracy and transferability of molecular dynamics (MD) simulation by learning many-body interactions, but remain slower than classical force fields due to fragmented kernels and memory-bound pipelines that underutilize GPUs. We show that a missing principle is making GNN-MD , carefully accounting for reads and writes between GPU high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and on-chip SRAM. We present , an efficient and accurate IO-aware SchNet-style GNN-MD framework built on four techniques: (1) , which fuses pairwise distance computation, Gaussian basis expansion, and cosine envelope into a single tiled pass, computing each distance once and reusing it across all basis functions; (2) , which fuses cutoff, neighbor gather, filter multiplication, and reduction to avoid materializing edge tensors in HBM; (3) , which reformulates scatter-add via CSR segment reduce, reducing atomic writes by a factor of feature dimension and enabling contention-free accumulation in both forward and backward passes; (4) channel-wise 16-bit quantization that exploits the low per-channel dynamic range in SchNet MLP weights to further improve throughput with negligible accuracy loss. On a single NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000, achieves aggregate simulation throughput over 64 parallel replicas on coarse-grained (CG) protein containing 269 beads ( faster than CGSchNet baseline with \textbf{80\\% less} peak memory), surpassing widely used classical force fields (, MARTINI) while retaining SchNet-level accuracy and transferability.