This paper presents a fine example of high-throughput computational materials screening studies, mainly focusing on the carbon nanoclusters of different sizes. In the paper, a set of diverse empirical and machine-learned interatomic potentials, which are commonly used to simulate carbonaceous materials, is benchmarked against the higher-level density functional theory (DFT) data, using a range of diverse structural features as the comparison criteria. Trying to reproduce the data presented here (even if you only consider a subset of the interaction potentials) will help you devise an understanding as to how you could approach a high-throughput structure prediction problem. Even though we concentrate here on isolated/finite nanoclusters, AIRSS (and other similar approaches like USPEX, CALYPSO, GMIN, etc.,) can also be used to predict crystal structures of different class of materials with applications in energy storage, catalysis, hydrogen storage, and so on.
Systematically improvable machine learning potentials could have a significant impact on the range of properties that can be modelled, but the toolchain associated with using them presents a barrier to entry for new users. Attempting to reproduce some of our results will help us improve the accessibility of the approach.
Popular descriptors for machine learning potentials such as the Behler-Parinello atom centred symmetry functions (ACSF) or the Smooth Overlap of Interatomic Potentials (SOAP) are widely used but so far not much attention has been paid to optimising how many descriptor components need to be included to give good results.
The results of this paper have been used in multiple subsequent studies as a benchmark against which other methods of performing the same calculation have been tested. Other groups have challenged the results as suffering from finite size effects, in particular the calculations on mixtures of cubic and hexagonal ice. Should there be time during in the event, participants could check this by performing calculations on larger unit cells. Each individual calculation should converge adequately within 96 hours making it amenable to a HPC ReproHack. Given modern HPC hardware many such calculations could be run concurrently on a single HPC node.
Because: - Two fellow PhDs working on different topics have been able to reproduce some figures by following the README instructions and I hope this extends to other people - I've tried to incorporate as many of the best practices as possible to make my code and data open and accessible - I've tried to make sure that my data is exactly reproducible with the specified random seed strategy - the paper suggests a method that should be useful to other researchers in my field, which is not useful unless my results are reproducible
The original data took quite a while to produce for a previous paper, but for this paper, all tables and figures should be exactly reproducible by simply running the jupyter notebook.
