First Open Chemistry Beta Release

We are pleased to announce the first beta release of the Open Chemistry suite of cross platform, open-source, BSD-licensed tools and libraries - Avogadro 2, MoleQueue and MongoChem. They are being released in beta, before all planned features are complete, to get feedback from the community following the open-source mantra of “release early, release often”. We will be making regular releases over the coming months, as well as automatically generating nightly binaries. A Source article from 2011 introduced the project, slides from FOSDEM describe it more recently, and the 0.5.0 release binaries/source can be downloaded here.

These three desktop applications can each be used independently, but also have the capability of working together. Avogadro 2 is a rewrite of Avogadro that addresses many of the limitations we saw. This includes things such as the rendering code, scalability, scriptability, and increased flexibility, enabling us to effectively address the current and upcoming challenges in computational chemistry and related fields. MoleQueue provides desktop services for executing standalone programs both locally and on remote batch schedulers, such as Sun Grid Engine, PBS and SLURM. MongoChem provides chemically-aware search, storage, and informatics visualization using MongoDB and VTK.