10th ABINIT International Developer Workshop – Part 2

10th ABINIT International Developer Workshop – Part 2
May 16-19, 2022 Guidel-Plages, France

Event website
The complete list of participants can be found here.

General presentation

The ABINIT developer workshops form a series of events, crucial for the community of ABINIT developers, organized every two years. A unique occasion for most developers to acquire or maintain a global view of the project and stay up to date with the latest capabilities, planned developments, and overall strategy. The developer workshop is always an opportunity to invite external researchers, from other codes and communities, to exchange best practices and expertise…

This workshop was the second part of the 10th ABINIT developer workshop. It was held from 16th to 19th May 2022 in Guidel-Plages (Brittany, France).

Because of the COVID19 pandemic situation, in June 2021, the meeting occurred in a fully remote version, with only remote presentations and some group discussions. We missed several important parts of the workshop : small group discussions, thematic discussions, informal discussions, hackathons, etc. Many of the participants emphasized the need to meet again in person when the health situation permits it.

In May 2022 we organized the second part of the workshop, with a smaller number of participants, mostly based on the missing ingredients above, plus a few invited presentations. It was a complementary and entirely live/offline event, consisting of discussions, round tables and hackathons. The physical presence of developers was a requirement to have efficient round tables and informal discussions.

The workshop was mainly dedicated to implementations and decision making by the developers:

Every morning we had a session of hackathons. Divided into small groups, we worked on the ABINIT package : coding, improving the documentation, creating tutorials, interfacing the code with other software, etc. Each developer chose projects and hackathons according to his/her specific expertise in the project.

During two afternoons, we met collectively to discuss and consider the future of the code: future scientific themes, dissemination and the visibility, user experience improvement.

A third afternoon was dedicated to invited speakers’ presentations. The speakers were chosen because of their involvement in projects external/complementary to ABINIT. Continue reading 10th ABINIT International Developer Workshop – Part 2

CECAM / Psi-k workshop “Error control in first-principles modelling”

From 20th until 24th June 2022 we organised a workshop on the theme of “Error control in first-principles modelling” at the CECAM Headquarters in Lausanne (workshop website). For one week the workshop unified like-minded researchers from a range of communities, including quantum chemistry, materials sciences, scientific computing and mathematics to jointly discuss the determination of errors in atomistic modelling. The main goal was to obtain a cross-community overview of ongoing work and to establish new links between the disciplines.

Amongst others we discussed topics such as: the determination of errors in observables, which are the result of long molecular dynamics simulations, the reliability and efficiency of numerical procedures and how to go beyond benchmarking or convergence studies via a rigorous mathematical understanding of errors. We further explored interactions with the field of uncertainty quantification to link numerical and modeling errors in electronic structure calculations or to understand error propagation in interatomic potentials via statistical inference.

Continue reading CECAM / Psi-k workshop “Error control in first-principles modelling”

Report for the workshop “Astrochemistry meets Surface Science: Theoretical Frontiers”

Scientific Report for the workshop “Astrochemistry meets Surface Science: Theoretical Frontiers”

April 5th – 8th 2022

Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark

Objectives:

The goal of the workshop was to bring closer together the research communities of theoretical Astrochemistry and theoretical (under Earth conditions) Surface Science. These two fields often address very similar questions, while using the exact same techniques and methodologies (e.g. electronic structure methods such as density functional theory, molecular dynamics or kinetic Monte Carlo simulations). And yet, despite these similarities, a noticeable communication gap exists between the two communities. Our multidisciplinary workshop aimed to bridge this gap and help establish new networking and collaboration ties between these fields.

The workshop covered a broad range of topics ranging from surface reaction networks and kinetic models to the characterization of interstellar ices and questions of energy dissipation and heat transport. In parallel to the underlying scientific questions, special focus was placed on theoretical and methodological aspects, as well as computational and numerical tools that are used in either one or both of the fields of astrochemistry and Earth-related surface science.

Continue reading Report for the workshop “Astrochemistry meets Surface Science: Theoretical Frontiers”