On the classical simulation of unimolecular reaction processes

The numerical simulation of the internal motions of a molecule undergoing a unimolecular reaction on an assumed potential energy surface requires the step-by-step solution of a set of simultaneous differential equations. After several thousand time steps, due to differences in the handling of rounding errors in different computing systems, the situation often arises that no two computing machines will give the same result for a given trajectory, even when running the identical algorithm.