Q-Chem¶

Q-Chem is a comprehensive ab initio quantum chemistry package for accurate predictions of molecular structures, reactivities, and vibrational, electronic and NMR spectra. The new release of Q-Chem 5 represents the state-of-the-art of methodology from the highest performance DFT/HF calculations to high level post-HF correlation methods:

• Fully integrated graphic interface including molecular builder, input generator, contextual help and visualization toolkit (See amazing image below generated with IQmol; multiple copies available free of charge);
• Dispersion-corrected and double hybrid DFT functionals;
• Faster algorithms for DFT, HF, and coupled-cluster calculations;
• Structures and vibrations of excited states with TD-DFT;
• Methods for mapping complicated potential energy surfaces;
• Efficient valence space models for strong correlation;
• More choices for excited states, solvation, and charge-transfer;
• Effective Fragment Potential and QM/MM for large systems;
• For a complete list of new features, click here.

How to access Q-Chem¶

NERSC uses modules to manage access to software. To see the available Q-Chem modules, type module avail qchem. To access a specific qchem module, type module load <qchem modulefile>, e.g., module load qchem/5.2. In general we recommend users to use the default module, which can be accessed with the following command,

cori$ module load qchem

How to run Q-Chem¶

Running interactively¶

To run Q-Chem interactively, you need to request a batch session using the "salloc" command, e.g., the following command requests one Cori Haswell node for one hour,

cori$ salloc -N 1 -q interactive -C haswell -t 1:00:00

When the batch session returns with a shell prompt, execute the following commands to run Q-Chem

cori$ module load qchem
cori$ qchem -slurm -nt 32 <Q-Chem input file>

The above qchem command will run the code with 32 OpenMP threads (-nt 32) on a Cori Haswell node.

Running batch jobs¶

Here are a few example run scripts. You need to submit the batch script using the sbatch command, assuming your job script is "run.surm",

cori$ sbatch run.slurm

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -q debug
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -t 00:30:00
#SBATCH -J my_job
#SBATCH -L SCRATCH
#SBATCH -C haswell

module load qchem
qchem -slurm -nt 32 B3LYP_water.in 

This script requests to run qchem on one Cori Haswell node with 32 OpenMP threads (-nt 32) per task.

The Q-Chem modules available on Cori were built for Haswell, however, the Haswell binaries runs on KNL nodes. You may want to run Q-Chem on Cori KNL nodes for a better job throughput. Here is a sample job script for Cori KNL,

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -q debug
#SBATCH -N 1
#SBATCH -t 00:30:00
#SBATCH -J my_job
#SBATCH -L SCRATCH
#SBATCH -C knl 

module load qchem
qchem -slurm -nt 68 B3LYP_water.in 

If you run single node Q-Chem jobs and do not need all the cores and memory available on the node, you can run your jobs under the shared QOS, which then you will be charged less. For more information about using the shared QOS, see our Running Jobs page. Here is a sample job script to run Q-Chem with the shared QOS:

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -q shared
#SBATCH -n 2
#SBATCH -t 1:00:00
#SBATCH -J my_job
#SBATCH -L SCRATCH

module load qchem
qchem -slurm -nt 2 B3LYP_water.in 

The distributed memory parallelism (MPI) was enabled in the default Q-Chem module, so you can run Q-Chem across multiple nodes. However, Only basic DFT and TD-DFT features in Q-Chem are capable of utilizing MPI parallelism, please consult the Q-Chem manual to ensure effective utilization of computational resources. Here is a sample job script to run Q-Chem across multiple nodes.

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH -q debug
#SBATCH -N 2
#SBATCH -t 00:30:00
#SBATCH -J my_job
#SBATCH -L SCRATCH
#SBATCH -C haswell

module load qchem
qchem -slurm -mpi -np 2 -nt 32 B3LYP_water.in 

Documentation¶

Q-Chem 5.2 manual pdf html