Long equilibration
Posted: Thu Feb 06, 2014 6:58 pm
I noticed that in my DMC calculation there is a problem with eqilibration. For example, a structure made of 13 C atoms and 9 H atoms (all-electron, not periodic), seems to equilibrate after 250 000 steps (with dmc_ave_period set to 100), and the the EBEST is roughly constant. The problem is this "roughly": EBEST constantly grows, and after 11 million steps it does not stabilize. The increase of energy is not huge (about 0.001 hartree in 9 million steps), but it is more or less constant, so I worry that probably the energies are highy correlated (and indeed, the reblock plot does not show a clear plateau).
So I have questions:
- Is such a long equilibration normal, for this size of system?
- If not, what can be the case?
- If not, should I restart the calculation, or rather continue this one?
In fact, I started another calculation for this system, with dmc_init_eref set closer to what I would expect from the above calculation - I thought that maybe it is a result of difference between initial VMC guess and DMC energy - but I am running this on PC, which is slower that the supercomputer I used for the above calculation, so for now I have too little data to compare.
So I have questions:
- Is such a long equilibration normal, for this size of system?
- If not, what can be the case?
- If not, should I restart the calculation, or rather continue this one?
In fact, I started another calculation for this system, with dmc_init_eref set closer to what I would expect from the above calculation - I thought that maybe it is a result of difference between initial VMC guess and DMC energy - but I am running this on PC, which is slower that the supercomputer I used for the above calculation, so for now I have too little data to compare.