The Basis Set Exchange
(BSE) has been a prominent fixture in the
quantum chemistry community. First publicly available in 2007, it
is recognized by both users and basis set creators as the de facto
source for information related to basis sets. This popular resource
has been rewritten, utilizing modern software design and best practices.
The basis set data has been separated into a stand-alone library with
an accessible API, and the Web site has been updated to use the current
generation of web development libraries. The general layout and workflow
of the Web site is preserved, while helpful features requested by
the user community have been added. Overall, this design should increase
adaptability and lend itself well into the future as a dependable
resource for the computational chemistry community. This article will
discuss the decision to rewrite the BSE, the new architecture and
design, and the new features that have been added.
The field of computational molecular sciences (CMSs) has made innumerable contributions to the understanding of the molecular phenomena that underlie and control chemical processes, which is manifested in a large number of community software projects and codes. The CMS community is now poised to take the next transformative steps of better training in modern software design and engineering methods and tools, increasing interoperability through more systematic adoption of agreed upon standards and accepted best-practices, overcoming unnecessary redundancy in software effort along with greater reproducibility, and increasing the deployment of new software onto hardware platforms from in-house clusters to mid-range computing systems through to modern supercomputers. This in turn will have future impact on the software that will be created to address grand challenge science that we illustrate here: the formulation of diverse catalysts, descriptions of long-range charge and excitation transfer, and development of structural ensembles for intrinsically disordered proteins.
The Molecular Sciences Software Institute's (MolSSI) Quantum Chemistry Archive (QCArchive) project is an umbrella name that covers both a central server hosted by MolSSI for community data and the Python‐based software infrastructure that powers automated computation and storage of quantum chemistry (QC) results. The MolSSI‐hosted central server provides the computational molecular sciences community a location to freely access tens of millions of QC computations for machine learning, methodology assessment, force‐field fitting, and more through a Python interface. Facile, user‐friendly mining of the centrally archived quantum chemical data also can be achieved through web applications found at https://qcarchive.molssi.org. The software infrastructure can be used as a standalone platform to compute, structure, and distribute hundreds of millions of QC computations for individuals or groups of researchers at any scale. The QCArchive Infrastructure is open‐source (BSD‐3C), code repositories can be found at https://github.com/MolSSI, and releases can be downloaded via PyPI and Conda.
This article is categorized under:
Electronic Structure Theory > Ab Initio Electronic Structure Methods
Software > Quantum Chemistry
Data Science > Computer Algorithms and Programming
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