A comparison of weighted ensemble and Markov state model methodologies.

Computation of reaction rates and elucidation of reaction mechanisms are two of the main goals of molecular dynamics (MD) and related simulation methods. Since it is time consuming to study reaction mechanisms over long time scales using brute force MD simulations, two ensemble methods, Markov State Models (MSMs) and Weighted Ensemble (WE), have been proposed to accelerate the procedure. Both approaches require clustering of microscopic configurations into networks of "macro-states" for different purposes. MSMs model a discretization of the original dynamics on the macro-states. Accuracy of the model significantly relies on the boundaries of macro-states. On the other hand, WE uses macro-states to formulate a resampling procedure that kills and splits MD simulations for achieving better efficiency of sampling. Comparing to MSMs, accuracy of WE rate predictions is less sensitive to the definition of macro-states. Rigorous numerical experiments using alanine dipeptide and penta-alanine support our analyses. It is shown that MSMs introduce significant biases in the computation of reaction rates, which depend on the boundaries of macro-states, and Accelerated Weighted Ensemble (AWE), a formulation of weighted ensemble that uses the notion of colors to compute fluxes, has reliable flux estimation on varying definitions of macro-states. Our results suggest that whereas MSMs provide a good idea of the metastable sets and visualization of overall dynamics, AWE provides reliable rate estimations requiring less efforts on defining macro-states on the high dimensional conformational space.

AWE-WQ: fast-forwarding molecular dynamics using the accelerated weighted ensemble.

A limitation of traditional molecular dynamics (MD) is that reaction rates are difficult to compute. This is due to the rarity of observing transitions between metastable states since high energy barriers trap the system in these states. Recently the weighted ensemble (WE) family of methods have emerged which can flexibly and efficiently sample conformational space without being trapped and allow calculation of unbiased rates. However, while WE can sample correctly and efficiently, a scalable implementation applicable to interesting biomolecular systems is not available. We provide here a GPLv2 implementation called AWE-WQ of a WE algorithm using the master/worker distributed computing WorkQueue (WQ) framework. AWE-WQ is scalable to thousands of nodes and supports dynamic allocation of computer resources, heterogeneous resource usage (such as central processing units (CPU) and graphical processing units (GPUs) concurrently), seamless heterogeneous cluster usage (i.e., campus grids and cloud providers), and support for arbitrary MD codes such as GROMACS, while ensuring that all statistics are unbiased. We applied AWE-WQ to a 34 residue protein which simulated 1.5 ms over 8 months with peak aggregate performance of 1000 ns/h. Comparison was done with a 200 µs simulation collected on a GPU over a similar timespan. The folding and unfolded rates were of comparable accuracy.