Molecular dynamics software

Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project aimed to help scientists develop new therapeutics for a variety of diseases by the means of simulating protein dynamics. This includes the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins, and is reliant on simulations run on volunteers' personal computers. Folding@home is currently based at the University of Pennsylvania and led by Greg Bowman, a former student of Vijay Pande.

GROMACS is a molecular dynamics package mainly designed for simulations of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids. It was originally developed in the Biophysical Chemistry department of University of Groningen, and is now maintained by contributors in universities and research centers worldwide. GROMACS is one of the fastest and most popular software packages available, and can run on central processing units (CPUs) and graphics processing units (GPUs). It is free, open-source software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) (GPL prior to Version 4.6).

Chemistry at Harvard Macromolecular Mechanics (CHARMM) is the name of a widely used set of force fields for molecular dynamics, and the name for the molecular dynamics simulation and analysis computer software package associated with them. The CHARMM Development Project involves a worldwide network of developers working with Martin Karplus and his group at Harvard to develop and maintain the CHARMM program. Licenses for this software are available, for a fee, to people and groups working in academia.

Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics (NAMD, formerly Not Another Molecular Dynamics Program) is computer software for molecular dynamics simulation, written using the Charm++ parallel programming model (not to be confused with CHARMM). It is noted for its parallel efficiency and is often used to simulate large systems (millions of atoms). It has been developed by the collaboration of the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group (TCB) and the Parallel Programming Laboratory (PPL) at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

LAMMPS (Large-scale Atomic/Molecular Massively Parallel Simulator) is a molecular dynamics program developed by Sandia National Laboratories. It utilizes the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallel communication, enabling high-performance simulations. LAMMPS is a free and open-source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. It is available on Linux, Windows, and macOS platforms.

thumb|right|AMBER is used to minimize the bond stretching energy of this ethane molecule.

CP2K is a freely available (GPL) quantum chemistry and solid state physics program package, written in Fortran 2008, to perform atomistic simulations of solid state, liquid, molecular, periodic, material, crystal, and biological systems. It provides a general framework for different methods: density functional theory (DFT) using a mixed Gaussian and plane waves approach (GPW) via LDA, GGA, MP2, or RPA levels of theory, classical pair and many-body potentials, semi-empirical (AM1, PM3, MNDO, MNDOd, PM6) and tight-binding Hamiltonians, as well as Quantum Mechanics/Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) hyb