James McNeely

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Desktop Recommendations

  • Macintosh

    • Personal Machine:

      Please follow the guidance of IS&T for student recommendations: https://www.bu.edu/tech/support/student/find-software-services/laptop-recommendations/

    • Research Machine

      I don’t recommend the purchase of a Mac for research purposes. They have limited modification and upgrade options, and furthermore the software options for Mac’s is much more limited.

  • PC

    • Personal Machine:

      Please follow the guidance of IS&T for student recommendations: https://www.bu.edu/tech/support/student/find-software-services/laptop-recommendations/

    • Research Machine

      In most cases, I recommend building your own PC, however if you are only interested in purchasing a computer to run an instrument and/or use the computer for routine tasks, a cheap option is a refurbished Dell machine (See Here). A machine that you build yourself gives you much more flexibility in terms of replacing parts, upgrading parts, troubleshooting, and it is can substantially reduce costs. My personal favorites for different components are as follows:

      • MOBO: I tend to prefer ASUS, but pick your poison here. Remember, this is an extremely important component, so don’t be too cheap!
      • CPU: Intel … AMD is cheaper but they still aren’t quite there on performance.
      • Storage: I highly recommend a SSD. Maybe a couple of standard drives for storage, dual boots, back-ups, etc…
      • RAM: Get as much as possible (Absolute minimum now-a-days is 8GB)!

      If you’d like assistance, I’d be happy to help. You can start seeing your options at PC Part Picker


Printers

  • Department Printers

    • Ricoh B&W Printer SCI 296A

      • Model: Ricoh Pro 8300S PS

      • IP ADDRESS: 128.197.30.19

      • Drivers: Download Link (Be Sure to Choose Correct OS)

    • Ricoh Color Printer Main Office

      • Model: Ricoh Aficio MP C4502

      • IP ADDRESS: 128.197.30.20

      • Drivers: Download Link

  • Personal/Group Printers

    • I tend to recommend network-enabled HP printers. There are ‘generic’ toner cartridges available online that are far cheaper. Just be careful when checking compatibility! Also, it’s generally a very bad idea to try to hook up your printer to WiFi when it is located on campus, so make sure it has a Wired port. In addition, almost all newish HP printers have the ability to implement a firewall. This is highly recommended. See the Campus IT Map from IS&T to see what to enable(http://www.bu.edu/tech/services/security/network/firewall/campus/ipspace/).

    • If you need a static IP for your printer, please contact IS&T (ithelp@bu.edu)


Operating Systems

  • linux
    • The current version of Ubuntu (22.04) has the Gnome interface. Ubuntu is still a very reliable and popular Linux OS. It is also relatively easy to operate without advanced command line skills, so I recommend Ubuntu for all ‘new’ Linux users. If you prefer the Unity interface, you can still install Ubuntu 16, or you can change the desktop environment in 22.04.

    • The Shared Computing Cluster (SCC) as recently moved to AlmaLinux. This is a similar desktop environment to CentOS, and has much of the same functionality…
  • Windows
    • Windows 11 is now the only version of Windows with mainstream support…

  • Macintosh
    • It’s generally best to use the most up-to-date version of Mac OS X. There are exceptions if you have some specialized software that you need. Check the software compatibility requirements in this case. I will also say that the latest releases of Mac OS X (past about OS X 10.11) really don’t offer that many improvements, and might not be worth the hassle of an upgrade.


Quantum Chemistry Software Recommendations

  • Inorganic Chemistry: In general, I gravitate towards ORCA. It contains a wide array of DFT options, multi-reference options, and basis sets that have easy-to-implement relativistic options. I would start with ORCA before going to any other ESS. ADF is also very powerful, but it isn’t cheap…

  • Organic Chemistry: Many organic groups use Gaussian as their default ESS program. While Gaussian has a very nice geometry optimization algorithm and it is highly robust, it can be slower than other programs. In particular for geometry optimizations, the RIJCOSX or RIJK approximations in ORCA will give one a great speed-up with minimal loss in accuracy. In addition, the performance of Firefly can be better than Gaussian, and it is easier to manipulate the results after the computation is done. Furthermore, Gaussian doesn’t have the latest DFT functionals available.

  • Spectroscopy: This depends on the spectra type. Gaussian is probably best Raman. I recommend ORCA for EPR and magnetic susceptibilities. For other canonical options, pick your poison!


Quantum Chemistry Visualization Recommendations

  • Building Structures (3D):

    • Avogadro: Notoriously buggy, but for the patient provides a multi-platform tool to build and ‘clean up’ structures. Also has a tool to generate input files for multiple popular electronic structure programs. Recent versions of the program behave much better than prior ones (in terms of bugs).
    • Chem3D (Windows Only): For organic chemists in particular, this is a very easy-to-use and robust tool.
    • Gabedit: Pretty large learning curve, but multi-functional and multi-platform for the willing.
    • GaussView: Available to faculty/staff/students associated with a Research Computing Project. Must be run remotely with an X-Window or via scc-ondemand, but still a robust tool to build reasonable structures that can then be refined with more advanced techniques. See the hands-on videos for help connecting to and using Gaussview to submit and analyze jobs.


Software Available At SCC

Software License Download Link Documentation Link
Abinit GNU GPL Abinit Abinit Documentation
ABINIT is a package whose main program allows one to find the total energy, charge density and electronic structure of systems made of electrons and nuclei (molecules and periodic solids) within Density Functional Theory (DFT), using pseudopotentials and a planewave or wavelet basis. ABINIT also includes options to optimize the geometry according to the DFT forces and stresses, or to perform molecular dynamics simulations using these forces, or to generate dynamical matrices, Born effective charges, and dielectric tensors, based on Density-Functional Perturbation Theory, and many more properties. Excited states can be computed within the Many-Body Perturbation Theory (the GW approximation and the Bethe-Salpeter equation), and Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory (for molecules). In addition to the main ABINIT code, different utility programs are provided. 
Amber 22 Site License [*] Amber 24 Amber Manuals
Amber is the collective name for a suite of programs that allow users to carry out molecular dynamics simulations, particularly on biomolecules.  None of the individual programs carries this name, but the various parts work reasonable well together, and provide a powerful framework for many common calculations.  The term Amber is also used to refer to the empirical force fields that are implemented here.  It should be recognized, however, that the code and force field are separate: several other computer packages have implemented the Amber force fields, and other force fields can be implemented with the Amber programs.  Further, the force fields are in the public domain, whereas the codes are distributed under a license agreement.
CFOUR License Download Online Documentation
CFOUR (Coupled-Cluster techniques for Computational Chemistry) is a program package for performing high-level quantum chemical calculations on atoms and molecules. The major strength of the program suite is its rather sophisticated arsenal of high-level ab initio methods for the calculation of atomic and molecular properties. Virtually all approaches based on Møller-Plesset (MP) perturbation theory and the coupled-cluster approximation (CC) are available; most of these have complementary analytic derivative approaches within the package as well.

Studies of excited electronic states and other “multireference” problems are possible using the equation-of-motion (EOM) coupled-cluster techniques. These techniques which are closely related to (and in some cases identical to) so-called Fock space multireference coupled-cluster theory, offer a powerful means to study open-shell systems and decided advantages when configuration mixing is important. At present, these include the EOMEE approach for singlet and triplet excited states, and the EOMIP and EOMEA methods that are best applied to low-spin doublet states. Analytic derivatives are available for these methods.

A number of methodological developments have been added to the program in the last two decades. These include: analytic second derivatives for all coupled-cluster approaches up to full CCSDT, the calculation of NMR chemical shifts at MP and CC levels of theory, the calculation of anharmonic force fields (via numerical differentation of analytic derivatives), relativistic corrections, corrections to the Born-Oppenheimer approximation at the CC level, nonadiabatic coupling within the EOM framework, and several others.

CHARMM Site License [****] Registration Link Documentation Links
CHARMM (Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics):

-is a versatile and widely used molecular simulation program with broad application to many-particle systems

-has been developed with a primary focus on the study of molecules of biological interest, including peptides, proteins, prosthetic groups, small molecule ligands, nucleic acids, lipids, and carbohydrates, as they occur in solution, crystals, and membrane environments

-provides a large suite of computational tools that encompass numerous conformational and path sampling methods, free energy estimates, molecular minimization, dynamics, and analysis techniques,and model-building capabilities

-is useful for a much broader class of many-particle systems

-can be utilized with various energy functions and models, from mixed quantum mechanical-molecular mechanical force fields, to all-atom classical potentials with explicit solvent and various boundary conditions, to implicit solvent and membrane models

-has been ported to numerous platforms in both serial and parallel architectures

Chimera License Downloads User Guide
Chimera is a highly extensible molecular visualization and analysis tool developed by UCSF. It supports interactive visualization of molecular structures, density maps, and related data, widely used in structural biology and bioinformatics. Chimera offers advanced features such as molecular modeling, docking, and sequence alignment tools. Its user-friendly interface and scripting capabilities make it suitable for both beginners and experienced researchers.
Firefly License Downloads Manuals
Firefly (previously known as the PC GAMESS) is a freely available ab initio and DFT computational chemistry program developed to offer high performance on Intel-compatible x86, AMD64, and EM64T processors. Firefly package is being developed by the Firefly Project Team. The project coordinator and leading developer is Dr. Alex A. Granovsky. A number of other researchers have made significant contributions to the project over last years, especially those of Drs. Anastasia V. Bochenkova and James W. Kress are to be mentioned.

Firefly has been constantly being developed to incorporate new functionality, improve performance, and extend existing features. For example, Firefly uses real time data compression/decompression, efficient modern algorithms of 2-e integral evaluation for direct calculation methods, very efficient MP2 energy and energy gradient modules, very fast RHF MP3/MP4 energy code, and state-of-the-art DFT, TDDFT, MCSCF, MRMP2, MCQDPT, and XMCQDPT implementation. Firefly runs parallel on SMP systems, clusters of computers, or both; with special attention paid to good scalability even on large clusters and many-core systems.

Gaussian Site License [***] N/A Online Manual
Gaussian is a general purpose electronic structure package for use in computational chemistry. It can predict properties of molecules and reactions including: molecular energies and structures, energies and structures of transition states, vibrational frequencies, IR and Raman spectra, thermochemical properties, bond and reaction energies, reaction pathways, molecular orbitals, atomic charges, multipole moments, NMR shielding and magnetic susceptibilities, vibrational circular dichroism intensities, electron affinities and ionization potentials, polarizabilities and hyperpolarizabilities, and electrostatic potentials and electron densities.

GaussView is a graphical user interface designed to be used with Gaussian to make calculations easier, quicker and more efficient.

GROMACS GNU LGPL GROMACS Manual
GROMACS is a versatile package to perform molecular dynamics, i.e. simulate the Newtonian equations of motion for systems with hundreds to millions of particles.  It is primarily designed for biochemical molecules like proteins, lipids and nucleic acids that have a lot of complicated bonded interactions, but since GROMACS is extremely fast at calculating the nonbonded interactions (that usually dominate simulations) many groups are also using it for research on non-biological systems, e.g. polymers.
GPAW GNU GPL Installation Documentation
GPAW is a density-functional theory (DFT) Python code based on the projector-augmented wave (PAW) method and the atomic simulation environment (ASE). The wave functions can be described with:

  • Plane-waves (pw)
  • Real-space uniform grids, multigrid methods and the finite-difference approximation (fd)
  • Atom-centered basis-functions (lcao)
HOOMD Open Source HOOMD Online Documentation
HOOMD-blue is a general-purpose particle simulation toolkit. It scales from a single CPU core to thousands of GPUs.

You define particle initial conditions and interactions in a high-level python script. Then tell HOOMD-blue how you want to execute the job and it takes care of the rest. Python job scripts give you unlimited flexibility to create custom initialization routines, control simulation parameters, and perform in situ analysis.

LAMMPS GNU GPL Download Page Online Documentation
LAMMPS is a classical molecular dynamics code, and an acronym for Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator.

LAMMPS has potentials for solid-state materials (metals, semiconductors) and soft matter (biomolecules, polymers) and coarse-grained or mesoscopic systems. It can be used to model atoms or, more generically, as a parallel particle simulator at the atomic, meso, or continuum scale.

LAMMPS runs on single processors or in parallel using message-passing techniques and a spatial-decomposition of the simulation domain. The code is designed to be easy to modify or extend with new functionality.

Maple Site License [*] Evaluation Manual
Maplesoft has been a trusted name in mathematics for over 20 years. By combining the world’s most advanced symbolic computation engine with powerful numeric algorithms, advanced visualization tools, and intuitive interfaces, Maplesoft products enrich your classroom and accelerate your research.
Mathematica Site License [****] BU Links Online Documentation
Mathematica is an advanced software system used for numerical, symbolic, and graphical computations and visualization.
Matlab Site License [****] BU Links MathWorks
MATLAB is the high-level language and interactive environment used by millions of engineers and scientists worldwide. It lets you explore and visualize ideas and collaborate across disciplines including signal and image processing, communications, control systems, and computational finance.
MDAnalysis GNU GPLv2 Source Code Online Documentation
MDAnalysis is an object-oriented python toolkit to analyze molecular dynamics trajectories in many popular formats. It can write most of these formats, too, together with atom selections suitable for visualization or native analysis tools.

MDAnalysis allows one to read molecular dynamics trajectories and access the atomic coordinates through NumPy arrays. This provides a flexible and relatively fast framework for complex analysis tasks. In addition, powerful atom selection commands are implemented. Trajectories can also be manipulated (for instance, fit to a reference structure) and written out.

NAMD License Download User Guide
NAMD (Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics) is a high-performance molecular dynamics simulation software designed for the efficient simulation of large biomolecular systems. It is widely used to study proteins, nucleic acids, lipid bilayers, and other complex molecular assemblies. NAMD supports parallel computing architectures, enabling scalable simulations on workstations, clusters, and supercomputers. Its compatibility with popular force fields and integration with visualization tools like VMD make it a popular choice in computational biophysics and chemistry.
NWChem ECL 2.0 Download Documentation
NWChem aims to provide its users with computational chemistry tools that are scalable both in their ability to treat large scientific computational chemistry problems efficiently, and in their use of available parallel computing resources from high-performance parallel supercomputers to conventional workstation clusters.

NWChem software can handle
• Biomolecules, nanostructures, and solid-state
• From quantum to classical, and all combinations
• Ground and excited-states
• Gaussian basis functions or plane-waves
• Scaling from one to thousands of processors
• Properties and relativistic effects

OpenBabel GNU GPL Installation Documentation
Open Babel is an open-source chemical toolbox designed to speak the many languages of chemical data. It enables interconversion between over 110 chemical file formats and offers a wide range of functionality including molecular modeling, structure editing, and format conversion. Open Babel is widely used in cheminformatics and computational chemistry workflows for data preparation, analysis, and manipulation.
OpenMM License Installation Documentation
OpenMM is a high-performance, extensible molecular simulation toolkit primarily designed for molecular dynamics simulations of biomolecules. It offers a flexible platform that supports GPU acceleration and advanced force fields, enabling efficient simulations on a wide range of hardware from laptops to supercomputers. OpenMM is widely used for research in computational chemistry, biophysics, and drug discovery, providing Python APIs to facilitate the development of custom simulation protocols.
Orca License Registration Manual
The program ORCA is a modern electronic structure program package written by F. Neese, with contributions from many current and former coworkers and several collaborating groups. The binaries of ORCA are available free of charge for academic users for a variety of platforms.
ORCA is a flexible, efficient and easy-to-use general purpose tool for quantum chemistry with specific emphasis on spectroscopic properties of open-shell molecules. It features a wide variety of standard quantum chemical methods ranging from semiempirical methods to DFT to single- and multireference correlated ab initio methods. It can also treat environmental and relativistic effects.
Due to the user-friendly style, ORCA is considered to be a helpful tool not only for computational chemists, but also for chemists, physicists and biologists that are interested in developing the full information content of their experimental data with help of calculations.
PLUMED Lesser GNU GPL Download Manual
PLUMED is an open source library for free energy calculations in molecular systems which works together with some of the most popular molecular dynamics engines. Free energy calculations can be performed as a function of many order parameters with a particular focus on biological problems, using state of the art methods such as metadynamics, umbrella sampling and Jarzynski-equation based steered MD. The software, written in C++, can be easily interfaced with both fortran and C/C++ codes.
Psi4 Lesser GNU GPL Installation Manual
Psi4 is an ab initio computational chemistry package originally written by the research group of Henry F. Schaefer, III (University of Georgia). Utilizing Psi, one can perform a calculation on a molecular system with various kinds of methods such as Hartree-Fock, Post-Hartree–Fock electron correlation methods, and density functional theory. The program can compute energies, optimize molecular geometries, and compute vibrational frequencies. The major part of the program is written in C++, while Python API is also available, which allows users to perform complex computations or automate tasks easily.
PWgui GNU GPL Download Documentation

PWgui is a GUI input builder for Quantum ESPRESSO integrated suite of codes for electronic structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale.

The following Quantum ESPRESSO programs are supported by PWgui: pw.x, neb.x, ph.x, pp.x, projwfc.x, bands.x, dos.x, hp.x, and ld1.x. This means that PWgui is able to create new and edit existing input files for these programs. In addition, it is possible to run the Quantum ESPRESSO programs by using the PWgui.

PWgui can also use XCrySDen for visualization of atomic structures from the pw.x input and output files or for the visualization of properties calculated with pp.x (when the property was saved into an XSF file).

PWgui is a GUI application that uses the Guib engine!!!

Py3DMol BSD Installation Documentation
Py3DMol is a python package for dependency-free molecular visualization in iPython notebooks. Objects from MDAnalysis, MDTraj, OpenBabel, and CClib can be visualized and manipulated directly in a notebook notebook. The backend visualization library, 3DMol.js, is included, so no additional libraries are necessary – visualizations will function in any modern browser using javascript and WebGL.
PyMOL Python License Download Documentation
PyMOL is a powerful open-source molecular visualization system widely used in structural biology and chemistry. It allows users to create high-quality 3D images and animations of molecular structures such as proteins, nucleic acids, and small molecules. PyMOL supports a variety of file formats and provides tools for manipulating, analyzing, and exploring molecular data.
PySCF Apache-2.0 Installation Documentation
PySCF is a free and open-source quantum chemistry code distributed on GitHub and released under the Apache-2.0 license. The development of PySCF began in 2014. Since then, it has grown from being a single-group code to one relied on daily by over 100 research teams in academia and industry across the world.
Quantum Espresso GNU GPL Downloads Documentation
Quantum Espresso is an integrated suite of Open-Source computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling at the nanoscale. It is based on density-functional theory, plane waves, and pseudopotentials.
RDKit BSD Installation Documentation
RDKit is an open-source cheminformatics toolkit that provides a wide range of functionality for chemical informatics, molecular modeling, and machine learning applications. It supports tasks such as molecular fingerprinting, substructure searching, descriptor calculation, and chemical reaction handling. RDKit is widely used in drug discovery, chemical data analysis, and bioinformatics due to its powerful Python API and integration with other scientific computing libraries. Its flexible architecture allows for easy extension and embedding in custom workflows and applications.
Schrödinger Token-Based License [v] Downloads Documentation
Schrödinger offers a comprehensive suite of computational chemistry and molecular modeling tools used extensively in drug discovery, materials science, and structural biology. Its platform includes applications for molecular docking, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics, and predictive modeling. Schrödinger software is known for its accuracy, scalability, and integration of multiple simulation methods within a user-friendly environment. It is widely adopted by both academic researchers and pharmaceutical companies for structure-based drug design and molecular analysis.
VMD License Downloads Manual
VMD is designed for modeling, visualization, and analysis of biological systems such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipid bilayer assemblies, etc. It may be used to view more general molecules, as VMD can read standard Protein Data Bank (PDB) files and display the contained structure. VMD provides a wide variety of methods for rendering and coloring a molecule: simple points and lines, CPK spheres and cylinders, licorice bonds, backbone tubes and ribbons, cartoon drawings, and others. VMD can be used to animate and analyze the trajectory of a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation. In particular, VMD can act as a graphical front end for an external MD program by displaying and animating a molecule undergoing simulation on a remote computer.
XCrySDen GNU GPL Downloads Documentation
XCrySDen is a crystalline and molecular structure visualisation program aiming at display of isosurfaces and contours, which can be superimposed on crystalline structures and interactively rotated and manipulated. It runs on GNU/Linux.

XCrySDen has been also ported to MAC OSX (requires X11) and Windows (requires CYGWIN).

The name of the program stands for Crystalline Structures and Densities and X because it runs under the X-Window environment.

Yambo GNU GPL Downloads Documentation
Yambo is a FORTRAN/C code for Many-Body calculations in solid state and molecular physics. Yambo relies on the Kohn-Sham wavefunctions generated by two DFT public codes: abinit, and PWscf. The code was originally developed in the Condensed Matter Theoretical Group of the Physics Department at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata" by Andrea Marini. Previous to its release under the GPL license, yambo was known as SELF.

Yambo is an important member of the key group of ab initio spectroscopy codes supported by the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility.

*Site Licence Applies to SCC only, personal copies not available
**Software only available on tripod in the Computer Graphics Lab (111 Cummington Mall, Room 203)
***Site Licence Applies to SCC only, personal copies not available.  User application must be filled out before use on the SCC.
****Site License applies to SCC, and there are also personal licenses available for some.  See BU website for more information
vToken-based license held by the Center for Molecular Discover (CMD)(https://www.bu.edu/cmd/)


Chemistry Department Software

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  • Origin
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