Lammps Supercomputer Code Developer Earns Special Recognition

Sandia National Laboratories researcher Steve Plimpton, who led development of a widely used computer code that models how materials behave, has been invited to present a keynote lecture at the Feb. 27-March 3 Minerals, Materials & Materials Society (TMS) meeting in San Diego. Plimpton developed the LAMMPS molecular-dynamics software code. The acronym LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) is also a pun on the word "lamp," a device that brings light to dark places.

"This symposium [on Massively Parallel Simulations of Materials Response] will particularly recognize your contribution as the primary developer of one large-scale parallel code, the LAMMPS molecular dynamics simulator, which has been of great help to the technical community, wrote symposium co-organizer and Virginia Tech engineering professor Diana Farkas in her invitation to Plimpton. "As users of LAMMPS, we feel that this contribution really deserves a special recognition."

LAMMPS is an open-source code (lammps.sandia.gov) initially funded fifteen years ago through an industrial Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between Sandia and multiple collaborators. Subsequent additions were supported by Sandia's Laboratory Directed Research and Development program, various Department of Energy (DOE) offices, and currently a recent CRADA focused on modeling nanoparticles in solution. Over the years, more than 100 significant contributions to the code have been made by Plimpton and other Sandia and external researchers.

At the atomic scale, LAMMPS can model soft (biomolecules, polymers) or solid-state (metals, semiconductors) materials. Using a more coarse-grained approach, the program can also model mesoscopic or even macroscopic systems as a collection of interacting particles. Able to run on single processors or multiple parallel processors, the code is designed to be easy to modify or extend with new functionality.

This ease of use has led to some 65,000 downloads since its open-source release in 2004, and more than 1,000 journal articles that have cited the code.