General Information
GAUSSIAN is a general purpose computational chemistry software package initially released in 1970 by John Pople and his research group at Carnegie Mellon University as Gaussian 70. The name originates from Pople's use of Gaussian orbitals to speed up molecular electronic structure calculations as opposed to using Slater-type orbitals, a choice made to improve performance on the limited computing capacities of then-current computer hardware for Hartree–Fock calculations.
License Restrictions
- GAUSSIAN may only be used by users or groups holding a valid license.
- GAUSSIAN may only be used for academic and teaching purposes. Additionally, using the software for directly or indirectly engaging in competition with GAUSSIAN is strictly forbidden by the license conditions.
- All scientific articles based on the usage of GAUSSIAN must contain suitable citations.
- GAUSSIAN software installed on the HPC systems may only be used on these systems. It is strictly forbidden to copy any files or folders from the software installation folder.
Obtaining Access
The Insitut of Physics currently holds a site license of
- GAUSSIAN09 version C.01
- GAUSSIAN16 version C.02
According to the License Agreement, GAUSSIAN is restricted to users located at the Physics Insitute. Contact the team of IT-Physik to get access.
Running GAUSSIAN
Lmod modules
Obtaining a list of available GAUSSIAN versions
module spider gaussian
GAUSSIAN modules may only be loaded by users or groups holding a valid license and being part of the granting IdM-group rzhpc-gaussian-user
.
Input File
GAUSSIAN is rather strict regarding the format of input files. Make sure empty lines are placed at all appropriate places, especially at the last line of the input file (which unfortunately is stripped by confluence in this example).
Note on parallization
At the moment only SMP-parallelization of GAUSSIAN using the --cpus-per-task
sbatch option is supported. Up to 128 CPU cores may be requested this way rendering multi-node parallelization unnecessary. There is no license available for multinode parallelization (named LINDA). Therefore keep the values of --ntasks
and --nodes
at 1
at all times.
General purpose sbatch template
Make sure the number of CPUs is specified in the GAUSSIAN inputfile (e.g. line %NProcShared=8
) and matches the --cpus-per-task
Sbatch setting.
sbatch script needs an argument
sbatch g09.sl formaldehyde.inp
sbatch script needs an argument
sbatch g16.sl formaldehyde.inp
Running Gaussview
Gaussview can be started from the login-nodes using the bash alias gv
defined by the Lmod module. Note that Gaussview5 is available with Gaussian09, and Gaussview6 with Gaussian16.
You need to enable X-Forwarding for your SSH session and load the Lmod module to make gv
work.
Simplified queuing-script
For quick execution a simplified queuing-script g09q
is provided. This script may be used for small calculations or teaching purposes as it makes some default assumptions regarding the requested memory (2G per CPU).
Submit a job using g09q
g09q 4 formaldehyde.inp
Submit a job using g16q
g16q 4 formaldehyde.inp
Support
If you have any problems with GAUSSIAN please contact the team of IT-Physik (preferred) or the HPC-Servicedesk.