Atomic SIMulation Tools

This package is a lightweight workflow and simulation manager for reproducible atomistic simulations that can be transferred across environments, calculators and structures. By using in-built or user-defined asimmodules and utilities, users can run/build their own simulation recipes and automagically scale them locally or on slurm based clusters. The core idea is to separate the dependence of the atomistic potential/calculator and the simulations steps thereby allowing the same simulation to be run with multiple calculators and the same calculator to be used for multiple simulations without altering simulation code. Input and output files must follow a strict format so that consistent analysis pipelines can be used across users

Developer philosophy

The goal of asimtools is to push all the complexity of workflow management, best-practices, file management etc. into the backend such that the everyday user only has to handle input files for existing workflows and asimmodule files for workflows they want to implement. The following are the guiding principles for how asimtools should work:

Asimmodules should resemble boilerplate ASE code as much as possible.
Asimmodules should not explicitly depend on a calculator
Asimmodules should not explicitly depend on the context/environment in which they run
It should be easy to debug individual asimmodules/parts in large workflows. In addition, it should always be possible to debug/resubmit jobs without using asimtools.
Input file structure and format should be standard across all asimmodules. In addition all input parameters should match how they would like without asimtools i.e. do not provide an API!
Job progress tracking must be incorporated
Best practices should be built-in e.g. if multiple jobs of the same slurm context are submitted simulataneously, it must be a job array.

Philosophy on User Experience

The philosophy is to build "simulations" using building blocks of asimmodules. Asimmodules are nothing but Python functions that return a dictionary, anything can be done in the function code. These asimmodules can be as complicated/efficient as you make them using any external packages you want and can be optimized with time but can still be run within the framework. This allows a test friendly way to transition from say a tutorial on the ASE/pymatgen website to an asimtools asimmodule. So while complicated wrappers are discouraged, they would still work as long as the asimmodule works. The benefit out of the box is that you can make your asimmodule independent of calculator or input structures and submit them easily.

Getting Started

These instructions will give you a copy of the project up and running.

Installing

You can install asimtools in a new conda environment using:

conda create -n asimtools python=3.7
conda activate asimtools

conda install ase -c conda-forge

git clone https://github.com/BattModels/asimtools.git
cd asimtools
pip install .

Individual calculators may need external packages for loading those calculators. For example if you want to use Quantum Espresso or CASTEP, you will have to install them. Similarly some asimmodules e.g. lammps.py might also need external packages to be used. It is up to the user to make sure those are installed.

You will also need to setup some environment variables, these variables point to global env_input.yaml and calc_input.yaml files with your favorite configurations since these are commonly shared among simulations. You can also directly specify them when running asim-execute (See asim-execute -h). You can also provide a directory for ASIMTools to search for your custom asimmodules. Examples of these files can be found in the examples.

Add the following to your .bashrc

export ASIMTOOLS_ENV_INPUT=/path/to/my/global/env_input.yaml
export ASIMTOOLS_CALC_INPUT=/path/to/my/global/calc_input.yaml
export ASIMTOOLS_ASIMMODULE_DIR=/path/to/my/asimmodule/dir

Running the tests

To run tests for the workflow tools, from the tests directory, call:

pytest

To run the test suite on a component component.py , call:

pytest test_component.py

To run all tests for the provided asimmodules, cd into the examples directory and call:

source run_all.sh

Or you can run a test for each individual example in its directory using:

source run.sh

If no errors are reported, the tests have passed. These tests simply test the functionality of the code, not the validity of the simulations!

To run tests for the provided asimmodules using slurm, you can similarly run the bash scripts ending with _slurm.sh.

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.

Authors

Keith Phuthi mkphuthi
Emil Annevelink emilannevelink

See also the list of contributors who participated in this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License

BattModels / asimtools