MultiPsi: A python-driven MCSCF program for photochemistry and spectroscopy simulations on modern HPC environments

Abstract

We present MultiPsi, an open-source MCSCF program for the calculation of ground and excited states properties of strongly correlated systems. The program currently implements a general MCSCF code with excited states available using either state-averaging or linear response. It is written in a highly modular fashion using Python/C++ which makes it well suited as a development platform, enabling easy prototyping of novel methods, and as a teaching tool using interactive notebooks. The code is also very efficient and designed for modern high-performance computing environments using hybrid OpenMP/MPI parallelization. This efficiency is demonstrated with the calculation of the CASSCF energy and linear response of a molecule with more than 700 atoms as well as a fully optimized conventional CI calculation on more than 400 billion determinants. This article is categorized under: Software > Quantum Chemistry Electronic Structure Theory > Ab Initio Electronic Structure Methods Theoretical and Physical Chemistry > Spectroscopy.