Experimental charge density of octafluoro-1,2-dimethylenecyclobutane: atomic volumes and charges in a perfluorinated hydrocarbon

Octafluoro-1,2-dimethylenecyclobutane, mp. 238 K, was crystallized in situ on a SMART 1000-CCD diffractometer, and high order X-ray diffraction data were collected at 100 K for a charge density determination. A topological analysis was applied and a partitioning of the molecule into atomic regions making use of Bader's zero flux surfaces yielded atomic volumes and charges. Corresponding atomic properties were also derived theoretically from B3LYP/6-311++G(3df,3pd) wavefunctions. While for carbon the volumes and charges are largely dependent on their bonding environment, fluorine has an almost constant atomic volume around 16-17 A3 and a charge between -0.6 and -0.7e, not only in the title compound, but also in two further perfluorinated hydrocarbons, of which the charge densities were determined earlier.     

Advances in electric field and atomic surface derived properties from experimental electron densities

The present study is devoted to a general use of the Gauss law. This is applied to the atomic surfaces derived from the topological analysis of the electron density. The method proposed here is entirely numerical, robust and does not necessitate any specific parametrization of the atomic surfaces. We focus on two fundamental properties: the atomic charges and the electrostatic forces acting on atoms in molecules. Application is made on experimental electron densities modelized by the Hansen-Coppens model from which the electric field is derived for a heterogenic set of compounds: water molecule, NO(3) anion, bis-triazine molecule and MgO cluster. Charges and electrostatic forces are estimated by the atomic surface flux of the electric field and the Maxwell stress tensor, respectively. The charges obtained from the present method are in good agreement with those issued from the conventional volume integration. Both Feynman and Ehrenfest forces as well as the electrostatic potential at the nuclei (EPN) are here estimated from the experimental electron densities. The values found for the molecular compounds are presented and discussed in the scope of the mechanics of atomic interactions.     

Derivatives of molecular surface area and volume: simple and exact analytical formulas

The computational effort of biomolecular simulations can be significantly reduced by means of implicit solvent models in which the energy generally contains a correction depending on the surface area and/or the volume of the molecule. In this article, we present simple derivation of exact, easy-to-use analytical formulas for these quantities and their derivatives with respect to atomic coordinates. In addition, we provide an efficient, linear-scaling algorithm for the construction of the power diagram required for practical implementation of these formulas. Our approach is implemented in a C++ header-only template library.     

Improved evaluation of liquid densities using van der Waals molecular models

A new approach is presented to estimate molar volumes and densities of liquids in ambient conditions from van der Waals models, taking advantage of the correlation between the intermolecular volume and the atomic contributions to the molecular surface area. Using this approach, the role of hydrogen bonds can be quantified. The densities obtained prove remarkably close to the values derived from the ACD group contribution method. However, the present approach requires much less empirical parameters and may be applied to arbitrary H-C-N-O-F-S-Cl-Br compounds. Moreover, it is more reliable than earlier empirical procedures, including quantitative structure property relationships (QSPR). While it does not correct the deficiencies of group contribution methods, it provides a natural approach to introduce temperature effects.     

Molecular dynamics simulations of aqueous ions at the liquid–vapor interface accelerated using graphics processors

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are a vital tool in chemical research, as they are able to provide an atomistic view of chemical systems and processes that is not obtainable through experiment. However, large‐scale MD simulations require access to multicore clusters or supercomputers that are not always available to all researchers. Recently, scientists have returned to exploring the power of graphics processing units (GPUs) for various applications, such as MD, enabled by the recent advances in hardware and integrated programming interfaces such as NVIDIA's CUDA platform. One area of particular interest within the context of chemical applications is that of aqueous interfaces, the salt solutions of which have found application as model systems for studying atmospheric process as well as physical behaviors such as the Hoffmeister effect. Here, we present results of GPU‐accelerated simulations of the liquid–vapor interface of aqueous sodium iodide solutions. Analysis of various properties, such as density and surface tension, demonstrates that our model is consistent with previous studies of similar systems. In particular, we find that the current combination of water and ion force fields coupled with the ability to simulate surfaces of differing area enabled by GPU hardware is able to reproduce the experimental trend of increasing salt solution surface tension relative to pure water. In terms of performance, our GPU implementation performs equivalent to CHARMM running on 21 CPUs. Finally, we address possible issues with the accuracy of MD simulaions caused by nonstandard single‐precision arithmetic implemented on current GPUs. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2011     

A GPU solvent–solvent interaction calculation accelerator for biomolecular simulations using the GROMOS software

During the past few years, graphics processing units (GPUs) have become extremely popular in the high performance computing community. In this study, we present an implementation of an acceleration engine for the solvent–solvent interaction evaluation of molecular dynamics simulations. By careful optimization of the algorithm speed‐ups up to a factor of 54 (single‐precision GPU vs. double‐precision CPU) could be achieved. The accuracy of the single‐precision GPU implementation is carefully investigated and does not influence structural, thermodynamic, and dynamic quantities. Therefore, the implementation enables users of the GROMOS software for biomolecular simulation to run the solvent–solvent interaction evaluation on a GPU, and thus, to speed‐up their simulations by a factor 6–9. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010     

Partial Molar Volumes and Heat Capacities of Some Analogs of Acyclovir

We have investigated acyclovir and eleven of its analogs modified in the base moiety (bicyclic and tricyclic) and ganciclovir, an analog modified in the acyclic chain. Partial molar volumes and heat capacities of aqueous solutions of five of these compounds were determined from acyclovir; density measurements are reported here. The dependence of the partial molar quantities on the number of substituted CH₂ groups were determined. For all compounds, the values of V^o₂ were evaluated by using a simple scheme of group contributions. The structural parameters of these compounds were determined by the SYBYL (Tripos, USA) package. Molecular volumes, volumes of solvation shell, as well as molecular surface areas and their atomic partition were calculated with the aid of GEPOL Version 12.1. From these data, the relative densities of the solvation shells characterizing the structure of the solvent around the solute molecules were obtained. The polarity, defined as the ratio of the surface of polar groups and atoms exposed to the solvent to the total molecular surface of the molecule studied, was evaluated. Linear dependencies were found between the densities of solvation shells and the polarity which permitted the relative densities of solvation shell is to be found.     

A fast parallel clustering algorithm for molecular simulation trajectories

We implemented a GPU‐powered parallel k‐centers algorithm to perform clustering on the conformations of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The algorithm is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the CPU implementation. We tested our algorithm on four protein MD simulation datasets ranging from the small Alanine Dipeptide to a 370‐residue Maltose Binding Protein (MBP). It is capable of grouping 250,000 conformations of the MBP into 4000 clusters within 40 seconds. To achieve this, we effectively parallelized the code on the GPU and utilize the triangle inequality of metric spaces. Furthermore, the algorithm's running time is linear with respect to the number of cluster centers. In addition, we found the triangle inequality to be less effective in higher dimensions and provide a mathematical rationale. Finally, using Alanine Dipeptide as an example, we show a strong correlation between cluster populations resulting from the k‐centers algorithm and the underlying density. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Acceleration of the GAMESS‐UK electronic structure package on graphical processing units

The approach used to calculate the two‐electron integral by many electronic structure packages including generalized atomic and molecular electronic structure system‐UK has been designed for CPU‐based compute units. We redesigned the two‐electron compute algorithm for acceleration on a graphical processing unit (GPU). We report the acceleration strategy and illustrate it on the (ss|ss) type integrals. This strategy is general for Fortran‐based codes and uses the Accelerator compiler from Portland Group International and GPU‐based accelerators from Nvidia. The evaluation of (ss|ss) type integrals within calculations using Hartree Fock ab initio methods and density functional theory are accelerated by single and quad GPU hardware systems by factors of 43 and 153, respectively. The overall speedup for a single self consistent field cycle is at least a factor of eight times faster on a single GPU compared with that of a single CPU. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2011     

Massively parallel algorithm and implementation of RI‐MP2 energy calculation for peta‐scale many‐core supercomputers

A new parallel algorithm and its implementation for the RI‐MP2 energy calculation utilizing peta‐flop‐class many‐core supercomputers are presented. Some improvements from the previous algorithm (J. Chem. Theory Comput. 2013, 9, 5373) have been performed: (1) a dual‐level hierarchical parallelization scheme that enables the use of more than 10,000 Message Passing Interface (MPI) processes and (2) a new data communication scheme that reduces network communication overhead. A multi‐node and multi‐GPU implementation of the present algorithm is presented for calculations on a central processing unit (CPU)/graphics processing unit (GPU) hybrid supercomputer. Benchmark results of the new algorithm and its implementation using the K computer (CPU clustering system) and TSUBAME 2.5 (CPU/GPU hybrid system) demonstrate high efficiency. The peak performance of 3.1 PFLOPS is attained using 80,199 nodes of the K computer. The peak performance of the multi‐node and multi‐GPU implementation is 514 TFLOPS using 1349 nodes and 4047 GPUs of TSUBAME 2.5. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Controlling Single Molecule Conductance by a Locally Induced Chemical Reaction on Individual Thiophene Units

Among the prerequisites for the progress of single‐molecule‐based electronic devices are a better understanding of the electronic properties at the individual molecular level and the development of methods to tune the charge transport through molecular junctions. Scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) is an ideal tool not only for the characterization, but also for the manipulation of single atoms and molecules on surfaces. The conductance through a single molecule can be measured by contacting the molecule with atomic precision and forming a molecular bridge between the metallic STM tip electrode and the metallic surface electrode. The parameters affecting the conductance are mainly related to their electronic structure and to the coupling to the metallic electrodes. Here, the experimental and theoretical analyses are focused on single tetracenothiophene molecules and demonstrate that an in situ‐induced direct desulfurization reaction of the thiophene moiety strongly improves the molecular anchoring by forming covalent bonds between molecular carbon and copper surface atoms. This bond formation leads to an increase of the conductance by about 50 % compared to the initial state.     

A reference‐free stockholder partitioning method based on the force on electrons

We argue that when one divides a molecular property into atom‐in‐a‐molecule contributions, one should perform the division based on the property density of the quantity being partitioned. This is opposition to the normal approach, where the electron density is given a privileged role in defining the properties of atoms‐in‐a‐molecule. Because partitioning each molecular property based on its own property density is inconvenient, we design a reference‐free approach that does not (directly) refer atomic property densities. Specifically, we propose a stockholder partitioning method based on relative influence of a molecule's atomic nuclei on the electrons at a given point in space. The resulting method does not depend on an “arbitrary” choice of reference atoms and it has some favorable properties, including the fact that all of the electron density at an atomic nucleus is assigned to that nucleus and the fact all the atoms in a molecule decay at a uniform asymptotic rate. Unfortunately, the resulting model is not easily applied to spatially degenerate ground states. Furthermore, the practical realizations of this strategy that we tried here gave disappointing numerical results. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

PAPER—Accelerating parallel evaluations of ROCS

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are flexibly programmable and have peak computational throughput significantly faster than conventional CPUs. Herein, we describe the design and implementation of PAPER, an open‐source implementation of Gaussian molecular shape overlay for NVIDIA GPUs. We demonstrate one to two order‐of‐magnitude speedups on high‐end commodity GPU hardware relative to a reference CPU implementation of the shape overlay algorithm and speedups of over one order of magnitude relative to the commercial OpenEye ROCS package. In addition, we describe errors incurred by approximations used in common implementations of the algorithm. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 2010     

Structural, dynamic, and electrostatic properties of fully hydrated DMPC bilayers from molecular dynamics simulations accelerated with graphical processing units (GPUs)

We present results of molecular dynamics simulations of fully hydrated DMPC bilayers performed on graphics processing units (GPUs) using current state-of-the-art non-polarizable force fields and a local GPU-enabled molecular dynamics code named FEN ZI. We treat the conditionally convergent electrostatic interaction energy exactly using the particle mesh Ewald method (PME) for solution of Poisson's Equation for the electrostatic potential under periodic boundary conditions. We discuss elements of our implementation of the PME algorithm on GPUs as well as pertinent performance issues. We proceed to show results of simulations of extended lipid bilayer systems using our program, FEN ZI. We performed simulations of DMPC bilayer systems consisting of 17,004, 68,484, and 273,936 atoms in explicit solvent. We present bilayer structural properties (atomic number densities, electron density profiles), deuterium order parameters (S(CD)), electrostatic properties (dipole potential, water dipole moments), and orientational properties of water. Predicted properties demonstrate excellent agreement with experiment and previous all-atom molecular dynamics simulations. We observe no statistically significant differences in calculated structural or electrostatic properties for different system sizes, suggesting the small bilayer simulations (less than 100 lipid molecules) provide equivalent representation of structural and electrostatic properties associated with significantly larger systems (over 1000 lipid molecules). We stress that the three system size representations will have differences in other properties such as surface capillary wave dynamics or surface tension related effects that are not probed in the current study. The latter properties are inherently dependent on system size. This contribution suggests the suitability of applying emerging GPU technologies to studies of an important class of biological environments, that of lipid bilayers and their associated integral membrane proteins. We envision that this technology will push the boundaries of fully atomic-resolution modeling of these biological systems, thus enabling unprecedented exploration of meso-scale phenomena (mechanisms, kinetics, energetics) with atomic detail at commodity hardware prices.     

Investigation of the molecular surface area and volume: Defined and calculated by the molecular face theory

Based on the molecular face (MF) theory, the molecular face surface area (MFSA) and molecular face volume (MFV) are defined. For a variety of organic molecules and several inorganic molecules, the MFSA and MFV have been studied and calculated in terms of an algorithm of our own via the Matlab package. The MFV shows a very good linear relationship with the experimentally measured critical molar volume. It is also found that the MFSA and MFV have significant linear correlations with those of the commonly used hard‐sphere model and the electron density isosurface. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010     

SMART: A solvent-accessible triangulated surface generator for molecular graphics and boundary element applications

Summary An algorithm is presented for generating a representation of the solvent-accessible molecular surface as a smooth triangulated manifold. The algorithm, called SMART (SMooth moleculAR surface Triangulator), divides the contact and reentrant portions of the solvent-accessible molecular surface into curvilinear three-sided elements. In contrast to the author's earlier implementation of this general approach [Zauhar, R.J. and Morgan, R.S., J. Comput. Chem., 11 (1990) 603], the SMART algorithm defines elements directly on the appropriate geometric surface types (rather than using interpolation over cubic elements), and has special features to handle highly distorted regions which often appear in deep crevices and internal cavities. While the method is designed for use with boundary element techniques in continuum electrostatics, it can also be applied to the accurate computation of molecular surface areas and volumes, and the generation of shaded surfaces for display with interactive computer graphics. Availability: Programs (in C) for surface generation, area and volume computation are available from the author. Also available is a graphics display program which runs on Silicon Graphics workstations.     

Quantitative ARXPS investigation of systems with ultrathin aluminium oxide layers

Angle‐resolved x‐ray photoelectron spectroscopy (ARXPS) is a non‐destructive method to investigate the near‐surface structure of specimens with a flat surface. For interpretation of the electron intensities emitted from different depth regions, model calculations are necessary. Based on an earlier algorithm we have developed a program for ARXPS studies of thin multilayers. In our model calculation the sample structure is treated as consisting of several layers (one to three) on the substrate, whereas the top layer can be incomplete. Emitted electrons are assumed to be attenuated exponentially in the layers. Different atomic volumes, electron attenuation lengths (including consideration of elastic scattering) and assumptions on stoichiometry are taken into account for the particular layers. As an application of our model calculations we present a study of a set of Al samples that were oxidized by different methods, i.e. natural and plasma oxidation (plasma obtained by electron cyclotron resonance). The oxide layers produced by plasma oxidation were protected by a 2 nm thick Co film, before exposing the samples to the air. Additionally, in order to check our results of the ARXPS model calculation, x‐ray reflectometry (XRR) analysis was used. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Molecular dynamics simulations of aqueous solutions of ethanolamines

We report on molecular dynamics simulations performed at constant temperature and pressure to study ethanolamines as pure components and in aqueous solutions. A new geometric integration algorithm that preserves the correct phase space volume is employed to study molecules having up to three ethanol chains. The most stable geometry, rotational barriers, and atomic charges were obtained by ab initio calculations in the gas phase. The calculated dipole moments agree well with available experimental data. The most stable conformation, due to intramolecular hydrogen bonding interactions, has a ringlike structure in one of the ethanol chains, leading to high molecular stability. All molecular dynamics simulations were performed in the liquid phase. The interaction parameters are the same for the atoms in the ethanol chains, reducing the number of variables in the potential model. Intermolecular hydrogen bonding is also analyzed, and it is shown that water associates at low water mole fractions. The force field reproduced (within 1%) the experimental liquid densities at different temperatures of pure components and aqueous solutions at 313 K. The excess and partial molar volumes are analyzed as a function of ethanolamine concentration.