Nano-Archimedes Is The Latest GNU Project, Making More Scientific Software Open-Source

The first version of GNU Nano-Archimedes was released on Sunday and is trying to free up more of quantum simulations.

Before getting too excited over this latest GNU project, it will likely only be relevant to a few Phoronix readers as it's a highly scientific. The GNU Nano-Archimedes project page describes the software, "GNU nano-archimedes is a Technology Computer Aided Design tool (TCAD) for the simulation of various technology relevant situtations involving the dynamics of electrons such as the transport in nanometer scale semiconductor devices (nanodevices) and time-dependent many-body problems coming from, for example, quantum chemistry and/or atomic physics. It is based on the Wigner equation, a convenient formulation of quantum mechanics in terms of a phase-space (completely equivalent to the Schroedinger equation), and the density functional theory (DFT). It is also able to deal with time-dependent ab-initio many-body simulations."

GNU Nano-Archimedes was started to try to free up more code in the area of quantum simulations, "GNU nano-archimedes has been created after observing the situation in the field of quantum simulations around the world. One easily observes that almost all codes developed for quantum simulations are non-free and/or proprietary codes. That is a very bad situation, especially for academic purposes, since it forces people to reinvent the wheel everytime a piece of code is needed. This surely slows down the progress of Science (immagine you had to rediscover the Newtonian laws every time you need them...). In the current situation, we have a huge amount of papers describing a lot of numerical methods for advanced simulations of quantum systems, but it is still very complicated to access any of these codes, on which one could build new and even more advanced methods."

For those into quantum simulations, beyond the GNU project site there is also Nano-Archimedes.com. This software is licensed under the GPLv3. The first version of this GNU software was announced on the GNU mailing list. Jean Michel Sellier announced, "nano-archimedes is the GNU package for the simulation of quantum systems by means of the signed particle formulation of quantum mechanics. It is equivalent to other formulations (such as Schroedinger and Wigner) but has the strong advantages to be intuitive, highly parallelizable and easy to extend to situations such as inelastic scattering, etc."