During the past decades, quantum mechanical methods have undergone an amazing transition from pioneering investigations of experts into a wide range of practical applications, made by a vast community of researchers. First principles calculations of systems containing up to a few hundred atoms have become a standard in many branches of science. The sizes of the systems which can be simulated have increased even further during recent years, and quantum-mechanical calculations of systems up to many thousands of atoms are nowadays possible. This opens up new appealing possibilities, in particular for interdisciplinary work, bridging together communities of different needs and sensibilities. In this review we will present the current status of this topic, and will also give an outlook on the vast multitude of applications, challenges, and opportunities stimulated by electronic structure calculations, making this field an important working tool and bringing together researchers of many different domains.

We would like to thank Modesto Orozco and Hansel Gómez for fruitful discussions and Fátima Lucas for providing various test systems and helping with some visualizations. This work was supported by the EXTMOS project, grant agreement number 646176, and the Energy oriented Centre of Excellence (EoCoE), grant agreement number 676629, funded both within the Horizon2020 framework of the European Union. This research used resources of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility at Argonne National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Peer Reviewed