Tinker 8: Software Tools for Molecular Design

TLDR

Tinker 8 is a modular molecular mechanics and dynamics package written in portable Fortran 95 with OpenMP support. It supports diverse force fields, including polarizable AMOEBA, and offers MPI‑parallel Tinker‑HP, GPU‑accelerated Tinker‑OpenMM, and a Java GUI called Force Field Explorer. Tinker 8 runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Abstract

The Tinker software, currently released as version 8, is a modular molecular mechanics and dynamics package written primarily in a standard, easily portable dialect of Fortran 95 with OpenMP extensions. It supports a wide variety of force fields, including polarizable models such as the Atomic Multipole Optimized Energetics for Biomolecular Applications (AMOEBA) force field. The package runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows systems. In addition to canonical Tinker, there are branches, Tinker-HP and Tinker-OpenMM, designed for use on message passing interface (MPI) parallel distributed memory supercomputers and state-of-the-art graphical processing units (GPUs), respectively. The Tinker suite also includes a tightly integrated Java-based graphical user interface called Force Field Explorer (FFE), which provides molecular visualization capabilities as well as the ability to launch and control Tinker calculations.