New LAMMPS Feature Release 10 September 2025

LAMMPS
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Dear LAMMPS users and developers,

We are kicking off a new feature release cycle with this 10 September 2025 release. This version brings some significant changes that will hopefully benefit us moving forward:

  • The minimum required C++ standard is raised from C++11 to C++17 (we’re skipping C++14)
  • The minimum required CMake version is raised from 3.16 to 3.20
  • The ATC, AWPMD, and POEMS packages are removed
  • The LAMMPS-GUI sources are no longer bundled with LAMMPS and have moved to their own GitHub repository and the corresponding documentations to its own website
  • It is still possible to compile LAMMPS-GUI together with LAMMPS and there is a matching v1.8.3 release of LAMMPS-GUI as well.
  • The traditional build system is restricted to packages that do not require extra build steps in the lib folder. The long-term goal is to phase this build system out entirely and focus on building LAMMPS with CMake
  • The obsolete PyLammps and IPyLammps modules are removed and useful functionality moved to the lammps module
  • GCC compilers older than version 9.x are known to have problems and are warned about

This corresponds to requiring at least Ubuntu 22.04LTS (instead of Ubuntu 20.04LTS) or RedHat 8.x (with an updated compiler) or RedHat 9.x (instead of RedHat 7.x with EPEL) to build LAMMPS from source.

Other notable changes are:

  • The KOKKOS package now supports compiling with mixed and single precision for GPU targets.
  • dump image can render “dynamic bonds” (similar to VMD) for systems with implicit bonds (like ReaxFF or AIREBO or Tersoff etc.)
  • dump image can render (most primitive) regions

As usual, comments, bug reports, and other kinds of feedback are welcome.

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