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10. Future and history

This section lists features we are planning to add to LAMMPS, features of previous versions of LAMMPS, and features of other parallel molecular dynamics codes I've distributed.

10.1 Coming attractions
10.2 Past versions

10.1 Coming attractions

The current version of LAMMPS incorporates many features from previous parallel MD codes I developed. These include earlier versions of LAMMPS itself, Warp and ParaDyn for metals, and GranFlow for granular materials.

These are features in those codes that haven't yet made it into the current LAMMPS:

These are additional features we'd like to eventually add to LAMMPS. Some are being worked on; some haven't been implemented because of lack of time or interest; others are just a lot of work!


10.2 Past versions

LAMMPS development began in the mid 1990s under a cooperative research & development agreement (CRADA) between two DOE labs (Sandia and LLNL) and 3 companies (Cray, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Dupont). Soon after the CRADA ended, a final F77 version of the code, LAMMPS 99, was released. As development of LAMMPS continued at Sandia, the memory management in the code was converted to F90; a final F90 version was released as LAMMPS 2001.

The current LAMMPS is a rewrite in C++ and was first publicly released in 2004. It includes many new features, including features from other parallel molecular dynamics codes written at Sandia, namely ParaDyn, Warp, and GranFlow. ParaDyn is a parallel implementation of the popular serial DYNAMO code developed by Stephen Foiles and Murray Daw for their embedded atom method (EAM) metal potentials. ParaDyn uses atom- and force-decomposition algorithms to run in parallel. Warp is also a parallel implementation of the EAM potentials designed for large problems, with boundary conditions specific to shearing solids in varying geometries. GranFlow is a granular materials code with potentials and boundary conditions peculiar to granular systems. All of these codes (except ParaDyn) use spatial-decomposition techniques for their parallelism.

These older codes are available for download from the LAMMPS WWW site, except for Warp & GranFlow which were primarily used internally. A brief listing of their features is given here.

LAMMPS 2001

LAMMPS 99

Warp

ParaDyn

GranFlow