JAX, M.D.: End-to-End Differentiable, Hardware Accelerated, Molecular Dynamics in Pure Python
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A large fraction of computational science involves simulating the dynamics of particles that interact via pairwise or many-body interactions. These simulations, called Molecular Dynamics (MD), span a vast range of subjects from physics and materials science to biochemistry and drug discovery. Most MD software involves significant use of handwritten derivatives and code reuse across C++, FORTRAN, and CUDA. This is reminiscent of the state of machine learning before automatic differentiation became popular. In this work we bring the substantial advances in software that have taken place in machine learning to MD with JAX, M.D. (JAX MD). JAX MD is an end-to-end differentiable MD package written entirely in Python that can be just-in-time compiled to CPU, GPU, or TPU. JAX MD allows researchers to iterate extremely quickly and lets researchers easily incorporate machine learning models into their workflows. Finally, since all of the simulation code is written in Python, researchers can have unprecedented flexibility in setting up experiments without having to edit any low-level C++ or CUDA code. In addition to making existing workloads easier, JAX MD allows researchers to take derivatives through whole-simulations as well as seamlessly incorporate neural networks into simulations. This paper explores the architecture of JAX MD and its capabilities through several vignettes. Code is available at www.github.com/google/jax-md. We also provide an interactive Colab notebook that goes through all of the experiments discussed in the paper.
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