Developer's Voice
Voice from the ALPS developer
History of ALPS
Development of scheduler for Monte Carlo simulation of strongly correlated quantum lattice model, which later became a prototype of ALPS, dates back until 1998. The first version of ALPS, version 1.0, has been released in 2004, which includes various simulation methods other than Monte Carlo. After several releases up to version 1.3 that includes DMRG application, new version 2.0 that firstly supported Windows operating system and the HDF5 file format was released in 2011. As of 2015, ALPS version 2.2 is under development.
Features of ALPS
In ALPS, one can simulate various quantum models on any lattice. It is even possible to define original lattices or hamiltonians by using XML language, unless predefined in ALPS. Various state-of-the-art applications (solvers) have been prepared including the exact diagonalization, quantum Monte Carlo, DMRG, DMFT, etc. Simulations can be executed in parallel on various systems from a PC to a supercomputer, for ALPS is equipped with a high-performance scheduler. Since the input/output format is shared by most of the ALPS applications, it is easy to choose the most suitable application according to the phenomena and/or physical quantities of interest.
Future of ALPS
We’d like to continue the development of ALPS, not only as the large-scale and highly-efficient software executed on advanced supercomputers, such as the K computer, but also as the application package used widely, e.g., for comparison with experimental results, reference for newly developed algorithms, etc.
Dream of developers
I’m aiming at a “de facto standard” for simulation of strongly correlated quantum lattice models. I dream that the ALPS will be used widely from lectures for undergraduate and graduate students to the most advanced researches in materials science.