GROMACS

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).

==History== The GROMACS project originally began in 1991 at Department of Biophysical Chemistry, University of Groningen, Netherlands (1991–2000). Its name originally derived from this time (GROningen MAchine for Chemical Simulations) although currently GROMACS is not an abbreviation for anything, as little active development has taken place in Groningen in recent decades. The original goal was to construct a dedicated parallel computer system for molecular simulations, based on a ring architecture (since superseded by modern hardware designs). The molecular dynamics specific routines were rewritten in the programming language C from the Fortran 77-based program GROMOS, which had been developed in the same group.