We present pseudopotential coefficients for the first two rows of the Periodic Table. The pseudopotential is of an analytic form that gives optimal efficiency in numerical calculations using plane waves as a basis set. At most, seven coefficients are necessary to specify its analytic form. It is separable and has optimal decay properties in both real and Fourier space. Because of this property, the application of the nonlocal part of the pseudopotential to a wave function can be done efficiently on a grid in real space. Real space integration is much faster for large systems than ordinary multiplication in Fourier space, since it shows only quadratic scaling with respect to the size of the system. We systematically verify the high accuracy of these pseudopotentials by extensive atomic and molecular test calculations. © 1996 The American Physical Society.

We present a library of Gaussian basis sets that has been specifically optimized to perform accurate molecular calculations based on density functional theory. It targets a wide range of chemical environments, including the gas phase, interfaces, and the condensed phase. These generally contracted basis sets, which include diffuse primitives, are obtained minimizing a linear combination of the total energy and the condition number of the overlap matrix for a set of molecules with respect to the exponents and contraction coefficients of the full basis. Typically, for a given accuracy in the total energy, significantly fewer basis functions are needed in this scheme than in the usual split valence scheme, leading to a speedup for systems where the computational cost is dominated by diagonalization. More importantly, binding energies of hydrogen bonded complexes are of similar quality as the ones obtained with augmented basis sets, i.e., have a small (down to 0.2kcal∕mol) basis set superposition error, and the monomers have dipoles within 0.1D of the basis set limit. However, contrary to typical augmented basis sets, there are no near linear dependencies in the basis, so that the overlap matrix is always well conditioned, also, in the condensed phase. The basis can therefore be used in first principles molecular dynamics simulations and is well suited for linear scaling calculations.

We generalize the concept of separable dual-space Gaussian pseudopotentials to the relativistic case. This allows us to construct this type of pseudopotential for the whole Periodic Table, and we present a complete table of pseudopotential parameters for all the elements from H to Rn. The relativistic version of this pseudopotential retains all the advantages of its nonrelativistic version. It is separable by construction, it is optimal for integration on a real-space grid, it is highly accurate, and, due to its analytic form, it can be specified by a very small number of parameters. The accuracy of the pseudopotential is illustrated by an extensive series of molecular calculations.

CP2K is an open source electronic structure and molecular dynamics software package to perform atomistic simulations of solid-state, liquid, molecular, and biological systems. It is especially aimed at massively parallel and linear-scaling electronic structure methods and state-of-the-art ab initio molecular dynamics simulations. Excellent performance for electronic structure calculations is achieved using novel algorithms implemented for modern high-performance computing systems. This review revisits the main capabilities of CP2K to perform efficient and accurate electronic structure simulations. The emphasis is put on density functional theory and multiple post–Hartree–Fock methods using the Gaussian and plane wave approach and its augmented all-electron extension.