Analog Computing for Molecular Dynamics
Sven Köppel, Alexandra Krause and Bernd Ulmann
Modern analog computers are ideally suited to solving large systems of ordinary differential equations at high speed with low energy consumption and limited accuracy. In this article, we survey 𝑁-body physics, applied to a simple water model inspired by force fields which are popular in molecular dynamics. We demonstrate a setup which simulate a single water molecule in time. To the best of our knowledge such a simulation has never been done on analog computers before. Important implementation aspects of the model, such as scaling, data range and circuit design, are highlighted. We also analyze the performance and compare the solution with a numerical approach.
Keywords: Analog computing, computational physics, quantum simulation