We employ the inverse Boltzmann method to coarse-grain three commonly used three-site water models (TIP3P, SPC and SPC/E) where one molecule is replaced with one coarse-grained particle with isotropic two-body interactions only. The shape of the coarse-grained potentials is dominated by the ratio of two lengths, which can be rationalized by the geometric constraints of the water clusters. It is shown that for simple two-body potentials either the radial distribution function or the geometrical packing can be optimized. In a similar way, as needed for multiscale methods, either the pressure or the compressibility can be fitted to the all atom liquid. In total, a speed-up by a factor of about 50 in computational time can be reached by this coarse-graining procedure.

We introduce a variation of the dissipative particle dynamics (DPD) thermostat that allows for controlling transport properties of molecular fluids. The standard DPD thermostat acts only on a relative velocity along the interatomic axis. Our extension includes the damping of the perpendicular components of the relative velocity, whilst keeping the advantages of conserving Galilei invariance and within our error bar also hydrodynamics. This leads to a second friction parameter for tuning the transport properties of the system. Numerical simulations of a simple Lennard-Jones fluid and liquid water demonstrate a very sensitive behaviour of the transport properties, e.g., viscosity, on the strength of the new friction parameter. We envisage that the new thermostat will be very useful for the coarse-grained and adaptive resolution simulations of soft matter, where the diffusion constants and viscosities of the coarse-grained models are typically too high/low, respectively, compared to all-atom simulations.

For simulation studies of (macro) molecular liquids it would be of significant interest to be able to adjust or increase the level of resolution within one region of space, while allowing for the free exchange of molecules between open regions of different resolution or representation. We generalize the adaptive resolution idea and suggest an interpretation in terms of an effective generalized grand canonical approach. The method is applied to liquid water at ambient conditions.

We propose the use of microcanonical analyses for numerical studies of peptide aggregation transitions. Performing multicanonical Monte Carlo simulations of a simple hydrophobic-polar continuum model for interacting heteropolymers of finite length, we find that the microcanonical entropy behaves convex in the transition region, leading to a negative microcanonical specific heat. As this effect is also seen in first-order-like transitions of other finite systems, our results provide clear evidence for recent hints that the characterization of phase separation in first-order-like transitions of finite systems profits from this microcanonical view.

We discuss recent advances of the VOTCA package for systematic coarse-graining. Two methods have been implemented, namely the downhill simplex optimization and the relative entropy minimization. We illustrate the new methods by coarse-graining SPC/E bulk water and more complex water-methanol mixture systems. The CG potentials obtained from both methods are then evaluated by comparing the pair distributions from the coarse-grained to the reference atomistic simulations. In addition to the newly implemented methods, we have also added a parallel analysis framework to improve the computational efficiency of the coarse-graining process.