From NWChem to NWChemEx: Evolving with the Computational Chemistry Landscape

K Kowalski and R Bair and NP Bauman and JS Boschen and EJ Bylaska and J Daily and WA de Jong and T Dunning and N Govind and RJ Harrison and M Keceli and K Keipert and S Krishnamoorthy and S Kumar and E Mutlu and B Palmer and A Panyala and B Peng and RM Richard and TP Straatsma and P Sushko and EF Valeev and M Valiev and HJJ van Dam and JM Waldrop and DB Williams-Young and C Yang and M Zalewski and TL Windus, CHEMICAL REVIEWS, 121, 4962-4998 (2021).

DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemrev.0c00998

Since the advent of the first computers, chemists have been at the forefront of using computers to understand and solve complex chemical problems. As the hardware and software have evolved, so have the theoretical and computational chemistry methods and algorithms. Parallel computers clearly changed the common computing paradigm in the late 1970s and 80s, and the field has again seen a paradigm shift with the advent of graphical processing units. This review explores the challenges and some of the solutions in transforming software from the terascale to the petascale and now to the upcoming exascale computers. While discussing the field in general, NWCHEM and its redesign, NWCHEMEX, will be highlighted as one of the early codesign projects to take advantage of massively parallel computers and emerging software standards to enable large scientific challenges to be tackled.

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