Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.1.0 of the KIM application programming interface (API). By conforming to this API, an atomistic simulation code will seamlessly work with any KIM-compliant interatomic model written in any supported language. The interface is computationally efficient and often requires relatively minor changes to existing codes.
Version 0.1.0 is a fully functioning API. It has the following main features:
* support for C, C++, FORTRAN 77, Fortran 90/95
* partial support for Fortran 2003 (more information available on request)
* support for static and dynamic linking of programs using the openKIM API
* communication of an arbitrary number of `arguments' to and from a Model
* support for multiple atomic species
* enables a simulation code to access and modify Model parameters
* support for five NBC (neighbor list and boundary conditions) methods
(See the README file described below for more information on these features.)
The distribution includes the API code, examples of simulation codes (Tests) and interatomic models (Models) and documentation. The purpose of this release is to familiarize users with how the API works and to get feedback to help guide the design of future releases. Note that this is an "alpha" release in computer science terms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_release_life_cycle). Additional features will be added to the next release (see below) which may *not* be fully-downward compatible.
To obtain the code, visit the following page:
and click on the link for the most recent package of the KIM API on the bottom of the page. Then do the following:
1. Unpack the tarball (on Unix/Linux/Mac OSX systems, type: tar zxvf openkim-api-latest.tgz) which will create the directory openkim-api-v0.1.0
2. Read the README file in the root directory (openkim-api-v0.1.0/README).
3. Install the package. See directions in the INSTALL file in the root directory.
4. Read the README file in the DOCs directory for a step-by-step guide to learning the API.