Implementation of sortreplicas executable for restarted REST2 simulations

From: Bhati, Agastya (agastya.bhati.14_at_ucl.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Oct 11 2017 - 14:12:44 CDT

Hi,

I have been performing FEP/REST2 simulations using the customised NAMD developed by Sunhwan and Wei (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpc.2015.08.030). I observed that sortreplicas executable seems to do correct sorting only when the trajectory files contain one extra snapshot. Let me elaborate this point with the following example cases.

- Case 1 (Fresh run): I set "steps_per_run", "runs_per_frame" and "num_runs" variables as 500, 10 and 4000, respectively. In addition, I run a 5000 step equilibration before attempting the first exchange. Therefore, the output trajectories have 401 snapshots. In this case, "sortreplicas" seems to sort the trajectories correctly with the final sorted trajectories containing only 400 snapshots. I am not sure what happens to the extra snapshot here but the sorted trajectories are well-behaved.

- Case 2 (Restarted run): I use the same input parameters as mentioned in case 1 above for a restarted simulation. Since in this case no equilibration is done before exchanging begins, the number of snapshots is 400. In this case, the sorted trajectories, which contain 400 snapshots, do not behave correctly and have problematic conformations.

- Case 3: I added the last snapshot of the unsorted trajectories from case 1 to the beginning of the unsorted trajectories from case 2. These modified trajectories contain 401 snapshots. On sorting these modified trajectories using sortreplicas, the resultant trajectories have 400 snapshots and are well-behaved.

My conclusion from the above three cases is that sortreplicas appears to do what is desired only when there is an extra snapshot at the beginning of the unsorted trajectories. I am not sure why does this happen and how sortreplicas gets rid of the extra snapshot. Does anyone else experience similar thing and understand it or am I missing something here and doing something wrong? If my conclusion is correct, is there a special way of implementing sortreplicas executable for restarted simulations where no extra snapshot is present?

Regards,

Agastya
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