Accelerating Molecular Dynamics with the Lennard-Jones potential for FPGAs

The requirements for more advanced, longer, and more precise molecular dynamics simulations are greater than ever. Even though we are better at optimizing and have more computational power than previously, there is also a continuing need to make simulations even faster, more reliable, and cheaper to run. In this paper, we are presenting a method for running a molecular dynamics simulation on an FPGA device by using Synchronous Message Exchange. The molecular dynamics simulation presented in this paper is a basic simulation using the Lennard-Jones potential. It is a work in progress, but the results are promising compared to a Python implementation using matrix calculations. We present a proof of concept of an initial solution and its performance provides results that make us believe that a full molecular dynamics implementation would be feasible and competitive.