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The United Kingdom Car-Parrinello Consortium (UKCP) is a group of researchers across the UK who develop `first principles' quantum mechanical techniques for studying atomistic systems and apply them to a very wide variety of systems.

UKCP is currently funded as a High-End Consortium by the Engineering and Physics Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

Consortium News

  • PhD Opportunity
    There is a funded PhD position in a UKCP-related area with Dr Joe Prentice, University of Manchester. See here for more details, and note the closing date for applications is 28th February 2025.
  • UKCP-LJC-CP2K Machine Learned Interatomic Potential Workshop in Cambridge, UK
    We are pleased to announce a UKCP ML theme workshop, which is co-organised with the UK CP2K developers and the Lennard-Jones Centre in Cambridge. The meeting will be held from the 20th-21st January 2025 in the Maxwell Centre, University of Cambridge.
  • 2024 CASTEP User Training Workshop in Oxford, UK
    UKCP are co-sponsoring the 2024 CASTEP User Training Workshop, from 16th-20th September at the University of Oxford. This workshop will cover the fundamentals required to use CASTEP for high-quality research simulations of a wide range of properties, from band-structures to NMR, EELS to phonons.
  • European School on Magnetism (ESM) 2024
    UKCP are co-sponsoring the magnetic materials modelling section of the European School on Magnetism 2024, to be held at the University of York (with an online option) from 27th August to the 6th September. This will cover the fundamentals of magnetic materials physics, as well as how to use first-principles modelling to simulate magnetic properties and phenomena. See here for full details.
  • CASTEP 24.1 Released
    The CASTEP developers are pleased to announce the release of version 24.1. This release includes significant improvements to the speed and parallel scaling, especially for large calculations, as well as a number of bug-fixes and improvements. CASTEP is dual-licensed, with a free worldwide academic source code licence, administered by STFC and available at the online STFC store.
  • 2023 CASTEP User Training Workshop in York, UK
    UKCP are co-sponsoring the 2023 CASTEP User Training Workshop, from 18th-22nd September at the University of York. This workshop will cover the fundamentals required to use CASTEP for high-quality research simulations of a wide range of properties, from band-structures to NMR, EELS to phonons. More details are available here?.
  • CONQUEST 1.2 Released
    The CONQUEST team are pleased to announce the release of v1.2, which includes a number of new features, along with bug fixes and code polishing, and updates to the manual. CONQUEST is distributed under an MIT licence, and is available freely on Github, with the manual available at readthedocs. Follow this link for more details of this new release.
  • CASTEP Community Conference 13-14th July
    This year sees the return of the CASTEP Community Conference, this time at the University of Warwick, UK. There will be a lively informal atmosphere with invited and contributed talks, a poster session and plenty of opportunities for discussion. See here for details and registration.
  • CONQUEST version 1.1 released
    We are very pleased to announce the release of v1.1 of CONQUEST. CONQUEST is one of UKCP's core simulation codes, and version 1.1 is the first full public release. Click here for the full announcement.
  • Three Senior Computational Scientist positions available
    Three open-ended posts are available in the Theoretical and Computational Physics Group of STFC to work on "Computational Materials Physics/Chemical Physics for Facilities". Click here for more details.
  • UKCP awarded 4-years' funding
    UKCP has selected as one of the UK's High End Computing Consortia by EPSRC, and funded for 4 years. This award enables UKCP to continue developing novel density functional theory methods and applications at the forefront of high-performance materials modelling.
  • Research Associate in developing large-Scale DFT in ONETEP
    A position is available at Imperial College London for a postdoctoral research associate to develop the ONETEP linear-scaling DFT code. See here for details.
  • Research Software Engineer in exascale HPC for materials modelling
    The University of York is hiring a research software engineer to develop several materials modelling codes, including CASTEP and ONETEP, to effectively use exascale high-performance computers, as part of the PAX-HPC project (see below). Click here for more details.
  • Particles at Exascale - High Performance Computing (PAX-HPC)
    UKCP are partners in the recently-awarded "Particles at Exascale" grant. This group brings together experts in particle simulations from the materials and molecular modelling community and the cosmology and astrophysics community, to deliver effective scientific simulation software on future exascale high-performance computers. This project is part of Phase 1b of the UK's ExCALIBUR project.

Archived news

UKCP is funded by EPSRC