CCL:G: Interaction of QC software components via text files



What nonsense about a code being free implies ANYTHING about socialism?

ACES is a free code, as are many others, and outcompetes all codes in CCSD(T) for massive parallelization 100s to 1000s of processors). There is no government funding for ACES. It’s written by CC people who have a need for its usage in work themselves and do not wish to charge others for it.

Moreover, by your logic, your email thoughts are sent freely, so you must be being paid by a government to do it! You’re a secret socialist agent...😠

Denigrating comments to free software like ORCA, GAMESS, ACES, CFOUR are not appreciated. We’re scientists; a lot of us do it because we love it and we do a better job because we love it.


On Oct 2, 2018, at 4:35 AM, Grigoriy Zhurko reg_zhurko_._chemcraftprog.com <owner-chemistry(-)ccl.net> wrote:


Sent to CCL by: Grigoriy Zhurko [reg_zhurko#%#chemcraftprog.com]
the ORCA optimizer is robust and efficient. ORCA's optimizer can be used
as an external optimizer and can be used for the described scenario.
Besides that, ORCA by itself provides plenty of density functionals and
efficient Post-HF methods. Using ORCA's optimizer as external optimizer
is well documented in the manual. ORCA is free of charge for academic
use (https://orcaforum.cec.mpg.de/).

ORCA seems to be an interesting choice (as far as I know, it provides 90% of features provided by Gaussian). I am thinking of switching from Gaussian to Orca in my research work, and in this case implementing the external use of ORCA will be easy for me. However, the main problem for me is that ORCA is a freeware code (state-funded). I greatly dislike socialism in any form, and I think that state-funded codes can provide good quality only if they compete with the commercial codes like Gaussian (and steal their algorithms). If the commercial codes disappear, the computation chemistry will go into stagnation.

The likewise freely available open source Psi4 program also has a
variety of ab initio and DFT methods implemented, and also supports a
variety of CBS extrapolations for energies and geometry optimizations
out of the box.

As far as I understand, the Psi program is state-funded too?

I’ve heard that the ADF program offers the external interaction. But ADF uses Slater functions instead of Gaussian ones; sorry for my profanity, but I can’t understand why such approach has not been rejected yet by the chemical community.



What you describe can be achieved by using the Atomic Simulation
Environment (ASE). The peer-reviewed article for ASE can be found
here and main webpage found here. ASE is a Python-based code meant
to manipulate, run, and analyse quantum-chemical calculations. ASE
has a built-in set of optimization routines (described here), and
the quantum-chemical program of your choice can be used just to
calculate the energies and forces required for ASE to update the
atomic positions. You then do not have to rely on the optimizers
built into Gaussian, and it operates using the exact same workflow
you proposed. ASE does support Gaussian as a calculator (as listed
here), but it is currently lacking documentation and would probably
require some modifications to suit all your needs.

So, if using Gaussian as an external calculator is in principle possible, I’d like to clarify some more points. I’ve heard that Gaussian authors even prohibit such manipulations, do they not?
The Gaussian package contains two exe files: e.g., g09w.exe (a GUI) and g09.exe. The first one evidently can be run to handle a gjf file only manually (not by another program). Maybe running the g09.exe file by my program would be a good choice, but as far as I remember, in previous version of Gaussian (G98) the g98w.exe and g98.exe files sometimes produced different outputs from the same gjf input (sorry for not sufficiently reliable information, I tried to reproduce this error with g09.exe but found difficult to run it).

One more question is, how high (low) is the speed of Windows QC codes if they are run from Linux via Wine.


But please, be aware that any serious quantum chemistry code is written by
professionals and it will be very challenging to "beat" built in
optimizers. Sometimes, slow optimization is rather a consequence of
chemical system at hand (too shallow PES minimum, noisy
energy/gradients, etc).

I have some experience of implementing a non-gradient optimization (e.g. Chemcraft performs it for setting a point group). Besides that, I suppose it can be a good approach to perform an optimization and frequencies computation in curvilinear coordinates specified manually by the user (using a GUI).

Could you be a bit more specific about DFT functionals and neural networks?

 Currently, this is just an idea; neural networks are powerful paradigms for some tasks, and implementing by me a NN for processing multiple single point DFT computations to obtain a single point energy is in principle possible.
 Grigoriy Zhurko



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