Overview of LAMMPS
==================

LAMMPS is a classical molecular dynamics (MD) code that models
ensembles of particles in a liquid, solid, or gaseous state.  It can
model atomic, polymeric, biological, solid-state (metals, ceramics,
oxides), granular, coarse-grained, or macroscopic systems using a
variety of interatomic potentials (force fields) and boundary
conditions.  It can model 2d or 3d systems with only a few particles
up to millions or billions.

LAMMPS can be built and run on a laptop or desktop machine, but is
designed for parallel computers.  It will run on any parallel machine
that supports the `MPI <mpi_>`_ message-passing library.  This includes
shared-memory boxes and distributed-memory clusters and
supercomputers.

.. _mpi: http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/mpi
.. _lws: https://lammps.sandia.gov

LAMMPS is written in C++.  Earlier versions were written in F77 and
F90.  See the `History page <https://lammps.sandia.gov/history.html>`_ of
the website for details.  All versions can be downloaded from the
`LAMMPS website <lws_>`_.

LAMMPS is designed to be easy to modify or extend with new
capabilities, such as new force fields, atom types, boundary
conditions, or diagnostics.  See the :doc:`Modify <Modify>` doc page for
more details.

In the most general sense, LAMMPS integrates Newton's equations of
motion for a collection of interacting particles.  A single particle
can be an atom or molecule or electron, a coarse-grained cluster of
atoms, or a mesoscopic or macroscopic clump of material.  The
interaction models that LAMMPS includes are mostly short-range in
nature; some long-range models are included as well.

LAMMPS uses neighbor lists to keep track of nearby particles.  The
lists are optimized for systems with particles that are repulsive at
short distances, so that the local density of particles never becomes
too large.  This is in contrast to methods used for modeling plasma
or gravitational bodies (e.g. galaxy formation).

On parallel machines, LAMMPS uses spatial-decomposition techniques to
partition the simulation domain into small sub-domains of equal
computational cost, one of which is assigned to each processor.
Processors communicate and store "ghost" atom information for atoms
that border their sub-domain.
