ABINIT Discussion Forums

Dear Developers,

What can ABINIT do? Of course, this question sounds stupid, but:

• I can find only the features of ABINIT 5.7 in the Internet
• release_notes contains only the changes since previous version
• new_user_guide.html contains NOTHING about the capabilities
• The question in FAQ ("What can ABINIT do") refers to info page with a broken link, the page contains the features of 2009 version
• features htmls contains the changes since previous version
• tex-files in presentations can't be read by any reader that I can find in the Internet

If I want to find the features of CASTEP, I just click a link, and read the features, for example on Accelrys website, castep.org, CCPFORGE and everywhere all over the Internet.
The same thing is with Quantum Espresso, Avogadro and every program in the Internet! However, ABINIT is a noumenon, some kind of Sand Man, who escapes every time you look at him.

What can ABINIT do?

If I want to find the features of CASTEP, I just click a link, and read the features,

Click the link:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=abinit+documentation

Open the first result given by Google and then click "help files" to have the list of features of the different versions!

Hope it helps!!

Of course, this question sounds stupid

Yes, it does.

Open a web browser. In the long white line on top, type http://www.google.com and press <return>. Then type abinit and left click on <google search> with your mouse.

First result: the Abinit homepage ... how convenient! From there, the first line "What is ABINIT" and just under click on Presentation. Guess what it is all about.
Second result: ABINIT - Wikipedia ... I know, only monkeys use Wikipedia to start learning about a subject.
Third result: Abinit Workshop 2013 ... yeah, only six months old stuff there related to the April 2013 workshop, nothing relevant
Fourth result: nanoHUB.org - Resources:ABINIT ... well, maybe it looks like a little hijacking exercise of clever guys from Purdue Univ. (I just made myself five new friends to start another flame war), they managed to mention http://www.abinit.org, Pr. X. Gonze, ... but they forgot to update the documentation link. Other clever guys from abinit.org foresaw this and added a little "News" frame on the same page; it goes to the last production release - 7.4.2 as I'm writing this.

Of course, this question sounds stupid

No, it doesn't

I can understand that the evaluation of the capabilities of an ever changing code like Abinit can be a bitter experience and that a lot can be learned from other projects presentation. You will probably notice on the website, in the documentation, ... that new users are invited to follow the tutorials. IMHO they give a good overview on the capabilities of the code and the correlations between them.
I'm not so impressed by a dry list "à la" CASTEP i.e.
Hamiltonians ... DFT XC functionals LDA, PW91, hybrid PBE0, B3LYP, ...
Structural methods ... full variable cell geometry optimization using BFGS, ...
(... and now if you want to try, spit out 1800 EUR and hope it will compile on your hardware)
Either you have sufficient background to understand this or it is complete gibberish. If you're part of the first group of users, you know that all these codes provide similar capabilities and you'll have to dig into the documentation to discover their specifics. And if you're part of the second group, it doesn't help you at all to answer the plain question: is this code able to help me and to solve my own problem?

Kind regards,

Alain