JDFTx  1.4.2
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Developer's Guide
Architecture.png

The figure above outlines the overall organization of the JDFTx codebase, and points out some of the key classes and their interactions. Use the modules list page to delve further into the functional organization of the code, and to find details about header files and classes. See Change log for the latest updates to the code, and Contributors to get in touch with other developers.

Within CMake, the overall compilation is divided into four main targets. Most of the functionality is compiled into a dynamic link library libjdftx. Three light-weight executables act as a front-end to this functionality:

  • jdftx: most DFT, solvation, liquids calculations, including post-processing
  • phonon: phonon dispersion and electron-phonon interaction calculations
  • wannier: generation of maximally-localized Wannier functions [19] and ab initio tight binding models.

This organization makes it potentially easy for other DFT codes to take advantage of JDFTx features, especially JDFT and solvation models, by linking directly to libjdftx. It is also easy to add custom user executables that link to libjdftx to do specialized calculations; use jdftx.cpp as a starting point: it has < 100 lines of code (linked to libjdftx) to produce jdftx.

The source code compiled into libjdftx is divided into four subdirectories (shown in green dotted lines in the chart above):

  • core: implements the basic data structures, operators and algorithms used by the rest of JDFTx. ManagedMemory handles the separate CPU and GPU memory spaces, automatically moving data between them when necessary. There are few explicit memory allocation / device memory copy calls outside the implementation of this class. Scalar fields used by the electronic and fluid codes, eg. ScalarField in real space and ScalarFieldTilde in reciprocal space derive from this class. Minimize.h provides Conjugate Gradients and L-BFGS algorithms, which are used for electronic and fluid free energy minimization, as well as ionic geometry optimization. Pulay provides a templated self-consistent field iteration used for electrons as well as the nonlinear solvation model in class NonlinearPCM. Electronic wavefunctions in ColumnBundle also use the same mechanism. Among the data structures, GridInfo describes the plane-wave grid and Fourier transforms, while Coulomb implements the Coulomb kernel in various dimensions [27].
  • fluid: contains a hierarchy of fluid models abstracted by base class FluidSolver. The classical DFT class of fluid models [28] [33] are implemented in FluidMixture which ties together several FluidComponent objects; each component in turn contains an IdealGas and Fex to describe the fluid functional, while the components may interact with each other using mixing functionals in Fmix. The hierarchy of solvation models are implemented in LinearPCM [14], NonlinearPCM [11] and SaLSA [34], which are all abstracted by the PCM class.
  • electronic: implements Kohn-Sham electronic DFT in the plane-wave basis. ElecInfo and ElecVars contain electronic occupations, wavefunctions, density, potential etc. and the functions to calculate dependent quantities, energies and the analytical derivatives of the energy with respect to these quantities. ExCorr and ExactExchange handle exchange-correlation terms of the functional. ElecMinimizer and SCF handle variational minimization and self-consistent field iteration on the electronic degrees of freedom. SpeciesInfo handles electron-ion interactions (pseudopotentials) and force calculations for one type of ion, which are then collected together into IonInfo for the whole system. IonicMinimizer and LatticeMinimizer implement optimization of the ionic and lattice geometries. Dump manages quantities to output and invokes requested post-processing routines. All above functionality (including fluids) is encapsulated in container class Everything, which describes the state of a JDFTx calculation.
  • commands: provides an object-oriented interface to defining commands and parsing input files. All three executables use this module to provide a consistent input file syntax, with phonon and wannier recognizing a few extra commands in addition to all commands understood by jdftx. Custom user executables can also take advantage of this mechanism, and easily extend jdftx by just adding necessary commands to the existing set that already describes full DFT calculations.

In addition, the source code distribution has the following subdirectories at the top level:

  • phonon: code for the phonon executable, beyond functionality in libjdftx.
  • wannier: code for the wannier executable, beyond functionality in libjdftx.
  • aux: several executables that link to libjdftx to do very specific tasks, which were mostly used for the development and unit testing of new (fluid) models prior to integration into main-line JDFTx. (Not compiled by default.)
  • opt: optional interface libraries to other programs that can be compiled with JDFTx.
  • pseudopotentials: archives of the pseudopotential libraries, GBRV [9] and SG15 [23], that are installed with JDFTx. These get extracted and installed into the build path.
  • scripts: helper scripts for geometry creation, output file parsing, conversion for visulaization and interfaces with other codes. See the Scripts page for documentation of all included scripts.
  • CMake-modules: customized library location code for the CMake build system.
  • doc and images: source files for generating all documentation contained in this website.