SG-0: a small standard grid for DFT quadrature on large systems

We report the development of a new standard quadrature grid for DFT calculations. Standard Grid 0 (SG-0) is designed to be approximately half as large as, and to provide approximately half the accuracy of, the established SG-1 grid. It is based on MultiExp and Lebedev quadrature for radial and angular coordinates, respectively. We find that SG-0 is typically 50% faster than SG-1 for energy, gradient, and hessian calculations for the exchange-correlation energy. This leads to a 35-38% speedup in the total gradient and hessian computations, and we particularly recommend its use for preliminary calculations on moderately large biochemical systems. It has been implemented as the default grid for DFT calculations in the Q-Chem 3.0 package.