ExTASY: Scalable and flexible coupling of MD simulations and advanced sampling techniques

For many macromolecular systems the accurate sampling of the relevant regions on the potential energy surface cannot be obtained by a single, long Molecular Dynamics (MD) trajectory. New approaches are required to promote more efficient sampling. We present the design and implementation of the Extensible Toolkit for Advanced Sampling and analYsis (Ex-TASY) for building and executing advanced sampling workflows on HPC systems. ExTASY provides Python based “templated scripts” that interface to an interoperable and high-performance pilot-based run time system, which abstracts the complexity of managing multiple simulations. ExTASY supports the use of existing highly-optimised parallel MD code and their coupling to analysis tools based upon collective coordinates which do not require a priori knowledge of the system to bias. We describe two workflows which both couple large “ensembles” of relatively short MD simulations with analysis tools to automatically analyse the generated trajectories and identify molecular conformational structures that will be used on-the-fly as new starting points for further “simulation-analysis” iterations. One of the workflows leverages the Locally Scaled Diffusion Maps technique; the other makes use of Complementary Coordinates techniques to enhance sampling and generate start-points for the next generation of MD simulations. We show that the ExTASY tools have been deployed on a range of HPC systems including ARCHER (Cray CX30), Blue Waters (Cray XE6/XK7), and Stampede (Linux cluster), and that good strong scaling can be obtained up to 1000s of MD simulations, independent of the size of each simulation. We discuss how ExTASY can be easily extended or modified by end-users to build their own workflows, and ongoing work to improve the usability and robustness of ExTASY.