De. Bernholdt et al., PARALLEL COMPUTATIONAL CHEMISTRY MADE EASIER - THE DEVELOPMENT OF NWCHEM, International journal of quantum chemistry, 1995, pp. 475-483
We describe the design philosophy, structure, and supporting tool kits
of the NWChem computational chemistry package. The primary purpose of
this effort was to develop efficient parallel algorithms for a broad
range of methods commonly used in computational chemistry. To facilita
te this, we developed a shared nonuniform access memory model which si
mplifies parallel programming while at the same time providing for por
tability across both distributed- and shared-memory machines. In addit
ion to this specific focus on parallelization, a substantial effort ha
s been made to simplify the general problem of large-scale software de
velopment, which is common to many research groups. We find that this
simplification can be achieved through judicious use of ideas from the
computer science field of software engineering in the design and impl
ementation of the program with minimal extra effort on the part of the
chemist. (C) John Wiley & Sons, Inc.