What’s new in ADF 2020

ADF is an AMS Engine

The most important change in AMS2020 is that ADF is only accessible via the AMS driver program. The standalone program ‘adf’ does not exist anymore. The job of the AMS driver is to handle all changes in the geometry, e.g. during a geometry optimization, using so-called engines like ADF for the calculation of energies and forces.

Important

In the AMS2020 release ADF is an AMS engine. We recommend you to first read the General section of the AMS Manual

If you use ADF exclusively via the Graphical User Interface (GUI), this change should not create any issues. If, on the other hand, you create input files by hand (or you use ADF via PLAMS), then you should be aware that shell scripts for ADF2019 and previous versions are not compatible with ADF2020 and have to be adjusted to the new setup (see also Automatic tool for conversion of ADF2019 shell scripts).

Some of the changes:

  • environment variables AMSHOME, AMSBIN (instead of ADFHOME, ADFBIN)
  • ams (instead of adf)
  • major restructuring of input and input keys
  • output files in separate directory
  • ams.rkf new binary output file, contains mainly geometry related data
  • adf.rkf binary output file (instead of TAPE21), contains mainly single point related data
  • AMS does not symmetrize coordinates by default, which ADF used to do. See also AMS driver system definition and symmetry section of ADF.
  • QM/MM, QM/QM, Quild with the Hybrid engine

See also

More details this can be found in the section AMSification of ADF

Bug ADF2006 - ADF2020

A bug in the analytic Hessian for spin-polarized PBE calculations was introduced in ADF2006. In AMS2020.103 this bug was fixed. For ADF2019.3 the bug is fixed in ADF2019.307. Workaround for older versions is to use numerical frequencies. The bug only affects analytical frequency calculations ran without LibXC, for spin polarized (unrestricted) calculations with GGAs using PBE (PBE, OPBE, RPBE, revPBE, and S12g).

New Defaults

New features