A new direct CI method for large CI expansions in a small orbital space

Abstract

A new direct CI method is presented, which is particularly suited for large CI expansions in a small orbital space. These are the type of expansions which are common in the CAS SCF method. Only one-electron coupling coefficients are stored, which leads to reduced elapsed times and storage requirements compared to earlier approaches. The two-electron coupling coefficients are implicitly created in the diagonalization step. The algorithm for updating the CI vector is formulated as the trace of a product of three matrices, Tr(A · D · I). By ordering the one-electron coupling coefficients (A) in a certain way the matrix D is easilly created as a sparse scalar product between these coefficients and the trial CI vector. The main computational step is then a simple matrix multiplication between the matrix D and the symmetry blocked integral matrix (1). This operation vectorizes very well on most vector processors. Another sparse scalar product between the resultant matrix and the coupling coefficients leads to the update of the CI coefficients. In a calculation on CRAY-1 with 30700 configurations, the two-electron part in a CI iteration required 10 s of which half went into the handling of the one-electron formula tape.