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Over the last few years, extraordinary advances in experimental and theoretical tools have allowed us to monitor and control matter at short time and atomic scales with a high degree of precision. An appealing and challenging route toward engineering materials with tailored properties is to find ways to design or selectively manipulate materials, especially at the quantum level. To this end, having a state-of-the-art ab initio computer simulation tool that enables a reliable and accurate simulation of light-induced changes in the physical and chemical properties of complex systems is of utmost importance. The first principles real-space-based Octopus project was born with that idea in mind, i.e., to provide a unique framework that allows us to describe non-equilibrium phenomena in molecular complexes, low dimensional materials, and extended systems by accounting for electronic, ionic, and photon quantum mechanical effects within a generalized time-dependent density functional theory. This article aims to present the new features that have been implemented over the last few years, including technical developments related to performance and massive parallelism. We also describe the major theoretical developments to address ultrafast light-driven processes, such as the new theoretical framework of quantum electrodynamics density-functional formalism for the description of novel light-matter hybrid states. Those advances, and others being released soon as part of the Octopus package, will allow the scientific community to simulate and characterize spatial and time-resolved spectroscopies, ultrafast phenomena in molecules and materials, and new emergent states of matter (quantum electrodynamical-materials).

Over the last few years, extraordinary advances in experimental and theoretical tools have allowed us to monitor and control matter at short time and atomic scales with a high degree of precision. An appealing and challenging route toward engineering materials with tailored properties is to find ways to design or selectively manipulate materials, especially at the quantum level. To this end, having a state-of-the-art ab initio computer simulation tool that enables a reliable and accurate simulation of light-induced changes in the physical and chemical properties of complex systems is of utmost importance. The first principles real-space-based Octopus project was born with that idea in mind, i.e., to provide a unique framework that allows us to describe non-equilibrium phenomena in molecular complexes, low dimensional materials, and extended systems by accounting for electronic, ionic, and photon quantum mechanical effects within a generalized time-dependent density functional theory. This article aims to present the new features that have been implemented over the last few years, including technical developments related to performance and massive parallelism. We also describe the major theoretical developments to address ultrafast light-driven processes, such as the new theoretical framework of quantum electrodynamics density-functional formalism for the description of novel light–matter hybrid states. Those advances, and others being released soon as part of the Octopus package, will allow the scientific community to simulate and characterize spatial and time-resolved spectroscopies, ultrafast phenomena in molecules and materials, and new emergent states of matter (quantum electrodynamical-materials).

First-principles electronic structure calculations are now accessible to a very large community of users across many disciplines, thanks to many successful software packages, some of which are described in this special issue. The traditional coding paradigm for such packages is monolithic, i.e., regardless of how modular its internal structure may be, the code is built independently from others, essentially from the compiler up, possibly with the exception of linear-algebra and message-passing libraries. This model has endured and been quite successful for decades. The successful evolution of the electronic structure methodology itself, however, has resulted in an increasing complexity and an ever longer list of features expected within all software packages, which implies a growing amount of replication between different packages, not only in the initial coding but, more importantly, every time a code needs to be re-engineered to adapt to the evolution of computer hardware architecture. The Electronic Structure Library (ESL) was initiated by CECAM (the European Centre for Atomic and Molecular Calculations) to catalyze a paradigm shift away from the monolithic model and promote modularization, with the ambition to extract common tasks from electronic structure codes and redesign them as open-source libraries available to everybody. Such libraries include "heavy-duty" ones that have the potential for a high degree of parallelization and adaptation to novel hardware within them, thereby separating the sophisticated computer science aspects of performance optimization and re-engineering from the computational science done by, e.g., physicists and chemists when implementing new ideas. We envisage that this modular paradigm will improve overall coding efficiency and enable specialists (whether they be computer scientists or computational scientists) to use their skills more effectively and will lead to a more dynamic evolution of software in the community as well as lowe

First-principles electronic structure calculations are now accessible to a very large community of users across many disciplines, thanks to many successful software packages, some of which are described in this special issue. The traditional coding paradigm for such packages is monolithic, i.e., regardless of how modular its internal structure may be, the code is built independently from others, essentially from the compiler up, possibly with the exception of linear-algebra and message-passing libraries. This model has endured and been quite successful for decades. The successful evolution of the electronic structure methodology itself, however, has resulted in an increasing complexity and an ever longer list of features expected within all software packages, which implies a growing amount of replication between different packages, not only in the initial coding but, more importantly, every time a code needs to be re-engineered to adapt to the evolution of computer hardware architecture. The Electronic Structure Library (ESL) was initiated by CECAM (the European Centre for Atomic and Molecular Calculations) to catalyze a paradigm shift away from the monolithic model and promote modularization, with the ambition to extract common tasks from electronic structure codes and redesign them as open-source libraries available to everybody. Such libraries include "heavy-duty" ones that have the potential for a high degree of parallelization and adaptation to novel hardware within them, thereby separating the sophisticated computer science aspects of performance optimization and re-engineering from the computational science done by, e.g., physicists and chemists when implementing new ideas. We envisage that this modular paradigm will improve overall coding efficiency and enable specialists (whether they be computer scientists or computational scientists) to use their skills more effectively and will lead to a more dynamic evolution of software in the community as well as l

First-principles electronic structure calculations are now accessible to a very large community of users across many disciplines, thanks to many successful software packages, some of which are described in this special issue. The traditional coding paradigm for such packages is monolithic, i.e., regardless of how modular its internal structure may be, the code is built independently from others, essentially from the compiler up, possibly with the exception of linear-algebra and message-passing libraries. This model has endured and been quite successful for decades. The successful evolution of the electronic structure methodology itself, however, has resulted in an increasing complexity and an ever longer list of features expected within all software packages, which implies a growing amount of replication between different packages, not only in the initial coding but, more importantly, every time a code needs to be re-engineered to adapt to the evolution of computer hardware architecture. The Electronic Structure Library (ESL) was initiated by CECAM (the European Centre for Atomic and Molecular Calculations) to catalyze a paradigm shift away from the monolithic model and promote modularization, with the ambition to extract common tasks from electronic structure codes and redesign them as open-source libraries available to everybody. Such libraries include “heavy-duty” ones that have the potential for a high degree of parallelization and adaptation to novel hardware within them, thereby separating the sophisticated computer science aspects of performance optimization and re-engineering from the computational science done by, e.g., physicists and chemists when implementing new ideas. We envisage that this modular paradigm will improve overall coding efficiency and enable specialists (whether they be computer scientists or computational scientists) to use their skills more effectively and will lead to a more dynamic evolution of software in the community as well as lowe, The authors would like to thank CECAM for launching and pushing the ESL, as well as hosting part of its infrastructure, and partly funding the extended workshops where most of the coding was done, both in the Lausanne headquarters and in the Dublin, Trieste, and Zaragoza nodes. Within CECAM, the authors particularly thank Sara Bonella, Bogdan Nichita, and Ignacio Pagonabarraga. The authors also acknowledge all the people who have supported and contributed to the ESL in different ways, including Luis Agapito, Xavier Andrade, Balint Aradi, Emanuele Bosoni, Lori A. Burns, Christian Carbogno, Ivan Carnimeo, Abel Carreras Conill, Alberto Castro, Michele Ceriotti, Anoop Chandran, Wibe de Jong, Pietro Delugas, Thierry Deutsch, Hubert Ebert, Aleksandr Fonari, Luca Ghiringhelli, Paolo Giannozzi, Matteo Giantomassi, Judit Gimenez, Ivan Girotto, Xavier Gonze, Benjamin Hourahine, Jürg Hutter, Thomas Keal, Jan Kloppenburg, Hyungjun Lee, Liang Liang, Lin Lin, Jianfeng Lu, Nicola Marzari, Donal MacKernan, Layla Martin-Samos, Paolo Medeiros, Fawzi Mohamed, Jens Jørgen Mortensen, Sebastian Ohlmann, David O’Regan, Charles Patterson, Etienne Plésiat, Markus Rampp, Laura Ratcliff, Stefano Sanvito, Paul Saxe, Matthias Scheffler, Didier Sebilleau, Søren Smidstrup, James Spencer, Atsushi Togo, Joost Vandevondele, Matthieu Verstraete, and Brian Wylie. The authors would also like to thank the Psi-k network for having partially funded several of the ESL workshops. A.O., E.A., D.L.-D., S.G., E.K., A.A.M., and M.C.P. received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 676531 (Centre of Excellence project E-CAM). The same project has partly funded the extended software development workshops in which most of the ESL coding effort has happened. A.G., S.M., and E.A. acknowledge support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 824143 (Centre of Excellence project MaX). M.A.L.M. ackn, Peer Reviewed, Postprint (author's final draft)

With big-data driven materials research, the new paradigm of materials science, sharing and wide accessibility of data are becoming crucial aspects. Obviously, a prerequisite for data exchange and big-data analytics is standardization, which means using consistent and unique conventions for, e.g., units, zero base lines, and file formats. There are two main strategies to achieve this goal. One accepts the heterogeneous nature of the community, which comprises scientists from physics, chemistry, bio-physics, and materials science, by complying with the diverse ecosystem of computer codes and thus develops “converters” for the input and output files of all important codes. These converters then translate the data of each code into a standardized, code-independent format. The other strategy is to provide standardized open libraries that code developers can adopt for shaping their inputs, outputs, and restart files, directly into the same code-independent format. In this perspective paper, we present both strategies and argue that they can and should be regarded as complementary, if not even synergetic. The represented appropriate format and conventions were agreed upon by two teams, the Electronic Structure Library (ESL) of the European Center for Atomic and Molecular Computations (CECAM) and the NOvel MAterials Discovery (NOMAD) Laboratory, a European Centre of Excellence (CoE). A key element of this work is the definition of hierarchical metadata describing state-of-the-art electronic-structure calculations., We thank James Kermode and Saulius Gražulis for their contribution to the discussion on the metadata, and Pasquale Pavone for precious suggestions on the metadata structure and names. We thank Patrick Rinke and Ghanshyam Pilania for carefully reading the manuscript. We thank Claudia Draxl and Kristian Thygesen for their contribution to the discussions on the necessary information to be stored for excitedstate calculations and on the error bars and uncertainties. We gratefully acknowledge Damien Caliste, Fabiano Corsetti, Hubert Ebert, Jan Minar, Yann Pouillon, Thomas Ruh, David Strubbe, and Marc Torrent for their contributions to the ESCDF specifications. We acknowledge Benjamin Regler for the development of the graphical interface for the query on the NOMAD Archive. We acknowledge inspiring discussions with Georg Kresse, Peter Blaha, Xavier Gonze, Bernard Delley, and Jörg Hutter on the energy-zero definition and scalar-field representation. We thank Ole Andersen, Evert Jan Baerends, Peter Blaha, Lambert Colin, Bernard Delley, Thierry Deutsch, Claudia Draxl, John Kay Dewhurst, Roberto Dovesi, Paolo Giannozzi, Mike Gillan, Xavier Gonze, Michael Frisch, Martin Head-Gordon, Juerg Hutter, Klaus Koepernik, Georg Kresse, Roland Lindh, Hans Lischka, Andrea Marini, Todd Martinez, Jens Jørgen Mortensen, Frank Neese, Richard Needs, Taisuke Ozaki, Mike Payne, Angel Rubio, Trond Saue, Chris Skylaris, Jose Soler, John Stanton, James Stewart, Marat Valiev for checking the information provided in Table 1 and for useful suggestions. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 676580, The NOMAD Laboratory, a European Center of Excellence, and the BBDC (contract 01IS14013E)., Peer Reviewed, Postprint (published version)

Preprint arXiv:1607.04738, Information and data exchange is an important aspect of scientific progress. In computational materials science, a prerequisite for smooth data exchange is standardization, which means using agreed conventions for, e.g., units, zero base lines, and file formats. There are two main strategies to achieve this goal. One accepts the heterogeneous nature of the community which comprises scientists from physics, chemistry, bio-physics, and materials science, by complying with the diverse ecosystem of computer codes and thus develops “converters” for the input and output files of all important codes. These converters then translate the data of all important codes into a standardized, code-independent format. The other strategy is to provide standardized open libraries that code developers can adopt for shaping their inputs, outputs, and restart files, directly into the same code-independent format. We like to emphasize in this paper that these two strategies can and should be regarded as complementary, if not even synergetic. The main concepts and software developments of both strategies are very much identical, and, obviously, both approaches should give the same final result. In this paper, we present the appropriate format and conventions that were agreed upon by two teams, the Electronic Structure Library (ESL) of CECAM and the NOMAD (NOvel MAterials Discovery) Laboratory, a European Centre of Excellence (CoE). This discussion includes also the definition of hierarchical metadata describing state-of-the-art electronic-structure calculations., This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 676580, The NOMAD Laboratory, a European Center of Excellence, and the BBDC (contract 01IS14013E). We thank James Kermode and Saulius Gražulis for their contribution to the discussion on the metadata, and Pasquale Pavone for precious suggestions on the metadata structure and names. We thank Patrick Rinke for carefully reading the manuscript. We thank Claudia Draxl and Kristian Thygesen for their contribution to the discussions on the necessary information to be stored for excited-state calculations and on the error bars and uncertainties. We gratefully acknowledge Damien Caliste, Fabiano Corsetti, Hubert Ebert, Jan Minar, Yann Pouillon, Thomas Ruh, David Strubbe, and Marc Torrent for their contributions to the ESCDF specifications. We acknowledge inspiring discussions with Georg Kresse, Peter Blaha, Xavier Gonze, Bernard Delley, and Jörg Hutter on the energy-zero definition and scalar-field representation. We thank Ole Andersen, Evert Jan Baerends, Peter Blaha, Lambert Colin, Bernard Delley, Thierry Deutsch, Claudia Draxl, John Kay Dewhurst, Roberto Dovesi, Paolo Giannozzi, Mike Gillan, Xavier Gonze, Michael Frisch, Martin Head-Gordon, Juerg Hutter, Klaus Koepernik, Georg Kresse, Roland Lindh, Hans Lischka, Andrea Marini, Todd Martinez, Jens Jørgen Mortensen, Frank Neese, Richard Needs, Taisuke Ozaki, Mike Payne, Angel Rubio, Trond Saue, Chris Skylaris, Jose Soler, John Stanton, James Stewart, Marat Valiev for checking the information provided in Table 1 and for useful suggestions., Preprint

We review an approach for the computation of Feynman integrals by use of multiple polylogarithms, with an emphasis on the related criterion of linear reducibility of the graph. We show that the set of graphs which satisfies the linear reducibility with respect to both Symanzik polynomials is closed under taking minors. As a step towards a classification of Feynman integrals, we discuss the concept of critical minors and exhibit an example at three loops with four on-shell legs., Comment: 17 pages, to appear in the proceedings of the workshop "Periods and Motives", Madrid, July 2012