  Population annealing is a powerful tool for large-scale Monte Carlo
simulations. We adapt this method to molecular dynamics simulations and
demonstrate its excellent accelerating effect by simulating the folding of a
short peptide commonly used to gauge the performance of algorithms. The method
is compared to the well established parallel tempering approach and is found to
yield similar performance for the same computational resources. In contrast to
other methods, however, population annealing scales to a nearly arbitrary
number of parallel processors and it is thus a unique tool that enables
molecular dynamics to tap into the massively parallel computing power available
in supercomputers that is so much needed for a range of difficult computational
problems.
