Graph Neural Networks Accelerated Molecular Dynamics

Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulation is a powerful tool for understanding the dynamics and structure of matter. Since the resolution of MD is atomic-scale, achieving long time-scale simulations with femtosecond integration is very expensive. In each MD step, numerous redundant computations are performed which can be learnt and avoided. These redundant computations can be surrogated and modeled by a deep learning model like a Graph Neural Network (GNN). In this work, we developed a GNN Accelerated Molecular Dynamics (GAMD) model that achieves fast and accurate force predictions and generates trajectories consistent with the classical MD simulations. Our results show that GAMD can accurately predict the dynamics of two typical molecular systems, Lennard-Jones (LJ) particles and Water (LJ+Electrostatics). GAMD's learning and inference are agnostic to the scale, where it can scale to much larger systems at test time. We also performed a comprehensive benchmark test comparing our implementation of GAMD to production-level MD softwares, where we showed GAMD is competitive with them on the large-scale simulation.