A configuration‐based heatbath‐CI for spin‐adapted multireference electronic structure calculations with large active spaces

Abstract

This work reports on a spin‐pure configuration‐based implementation of the heatbath configuration interaction (HCI) algorithm for selective configuration interaction. Besides the obvious advantage of being spin‐pure, the presented method combines the compactness of the configurational ansatz with the known efficiency of the HCI algorithm and a variety of algorithmic and conceptual ideas to achieve a high level of performance. In particular, through pruning of the selected configurational space after HCI selection by means of a more strict criterion, a more compact wavefunction representation is obtained. Moreover, the underlying logic of the method allows us to minimize the number of redundant matrix‐matrix multiplications while making use of just‐in‐time compilation to achieve fast diagonalization of the Hamiltonian. The critical search for 2‐electron connections within the configurational space is facilitated by a tree‐based representation thereof as suggested previously by Gopal et al. Usage of a prefix‐based parallelization and batching during the calculation of the PT2‐correction leads to a good load balancing and significantly reduced memory requirements for these critical steps of the calculation. In this way, the need for a semistochastic approach to the PT2 correction is avoided even for large configurational spaces. Finally, several test‐cases are discussed to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the presented method.