Changelog

There have been four main phases of development of sire since the project started in 2005.

GitHub (OpenBioSim): January 2023 - current

Development was migrated into the OpenBioSim organisation on GitHub.

2024.3.0 - October 2024

• Print residue indices of perturbed water molecules to SOMD1 log to allow for easier debugging.

• Add support for creating Na+ and Cl- ions as a means of generating templates for uses as alchemical ions.

• Fix sire.morph.merge function when one molecule is a monatomic ion. This prevents the attempted rigid-body alignment, which would fail due to there being too few degrees of freedom.

• Remove sire.move.OpenMMPMEFEP wrappers from build when OpenMM is not available.

• Set IFBOX pointer to 3 for general triclinic boxes in sire.IO.AmberPrm parser.

• Only exclude nonbonded interactions between from_ghost and to_ghost atoms if they are in the same molecule. This prevents spurious intermolcular interactions between molecules containing ghost atoms, e.g. a ligand and an alchemical water.

• Add Docker support for building wrappers on Linux x86.

• Port SOMD1 Boresch restraint implementation to PME code. (This feature was present in the reaction field implementation, but not for PME.)

• Port SOMD1 torsion fix to PME code. (This had been fixed for the reaction field implementation, but not for PME.)

• Fix issues with atomtype and atom records for dummy atoms in GROMACS topology files.

• Fixed buffer overflow when computing molecule indices to excluded to/from ghost atom interactions which caused corruption of the exclusion list.

• Fixed calculation of delta^2 in soft-core Couloumb potential.

• Exclude to/from ghost atom interactions from the ghost_14ff. Exclusions were already added to the ghost_ghostff, but not the ghost_14ff.

• Fixed description of soft-core alpha parameter in tutorial.

• Added debugging function to evaluate custom forces in OpenMM XML files. This allows a user to decompose the pair-wise contribtions to the custom OpenMM forces created by sire.

• Added a timeout to the OpenMM minimiser function. This gives the user a single tunable parameter to control roughly how long a minimisation should last before being aborted.

• Exposed missing pickle operator on the LambdaLever class.

• Fix bug setting custom nonbonded parameters for ghost atoms used in positional restraints in OpenMM.

• Fix exchange probability equations in sire.morph.replica_exchange function.

• Fix calculation of energy change following final constraint projection after energy minimisation. Previously the energy change was calculated from the final step of the minimisation, rather than the change in energy following the application of the constraints.

• Clear internal OpenMM state from dynamics object during minimisation, preventing the previous, pre-minimisation, state from being used when get_state() is called.

• Add support for QM/MM simulations using OpenMM. This uses the recent CustomCPPForceImpl introduced in OpenMM 8.1 to allow an interface between OpenMM and external QM or ML codes. We support a generic Python callback interface and a Torch based interface for ML models. This is documented in the new tutorial.

• Reinitialise OpenMM context if constraints change when setting lambda. Updating constraints in an OpenMM system does not update the associated data structures in the context. A full reinitialiasation is required.

• Give custom OpenMM forces meaningful names. This makes it easier to parse OpenMM XML files and debug custom forces, particularly when multiple forces of the same type are present.

2024.2.0 - June 2024

• Correctly set the element1 property in sire.morph.create_from_pertfile.

• Added mising maximum_cutoff() method so that the cutoff is set correctly when creating a ForceFieldInfo object.

• Added a sire.base.PageCache class which can be used to cache and restore objects to memory pages which are automatically paged to and from disk as needed. This lets you work on data that can’t fit in memory.

• Updated the way that sire.system.System objects hold the set of temporary frames in a trajectory. Rather than each molecule holding its own temporary frame, now the System object holds a SystemTrajectory object. This holds the frame data for all molecules in the System in a single binary array. The data for this array is paged to disk as needed via the above sire.base.PageCache class. This both significantly speeds up processing of these temporary frames, and ensures that long simulations do not fill memory, causing the system to crash. In addition, the SystemTrajectory object is NOT streamed to a S3 file. This means that the S3 file (used normally for restarts) won’t grow unbounded with temporary frames, meaning that it is safe to create restarts of long-running simulations. Note that this does mean that the temporary directory is lost. You must save the trajectory to a file at the end of your simulation or it will be lost. You can do this using the standard trajectory save functions, e.g. sire.save(mols.trajectory(), "output", format=["PRMTOP", "RST"]).

• Added code that automatically excludes non-bonded interactions between from_ghost and to_ghost atoms in the OpenMM layer. This is to prevent crashes caused by poor interactions between from_ghost atoms appearing over the top of to_ghost atoms during a perturbation where one group is grown over another.

• Ignore BioSimSpace format position restraint include directives when parsing GROMACS topology files.

• Added a map option (fix_perturbable_zero_sigmas) to prevent perturbation of the Lennard-Jones sigma parameter for ghost atoms during alchemical free energy simulations.

• [CHANGE IN BEHAVIOUR] - added code that ensures that, when editing molecules, the CGAtomIdx order will always follow the AtomIdx order of atoms. This is because a lot of code had implicitly assumed this, and so it was a cause of bugs when this wasn’t the case. Now, when you edit a molecule, on committing, the orders will be checked. If they don’t agree, then the CutGroups will be reordered, with atoms reordered as necessary to make the CGAtomIdx order match the AtomIdx order. If this isn’t possible (e.g. because atoms in CutGroups are not contiguous), then the molecule will be converted to a single-cutgroup molecule, with the atoms placed in AtomIdx order. As part of this change, the merge code will now also ensure that added atoms are added with the correct AtomIdx, rather than added as the last atoms in the molecule. This is also more natural. This fixes issue #202.

• Added the “center” keyword argument to the make_whole functions of Cursors, CursorsM and System (as well as to the legacy System class). Also allowed the constructor of Vector to recognise origin and zero as arguments, meaning you can write cursor.make_whole(center="origin"). This fixes issue #199.

2024.1.0 - April 2024

• Dropped official builds and support for Python 3.9, and added official builds and support for Python 3.12. Note that MacOS builds are currently 3.10 and 3.11 only, due to missing dependencies. This will be fixed in upcoming point releases.

• BREAKING CHANGE: Updated the API of sire.cas.LambdaSchedule so that you have to use named arguments for many of the functions (e.g. set_equation()). This is because the addition of force levers (as described below) made positional arguments ambiguous, and we wanted to make the API more consistent. This is a breaking change,

• Added the ability to customise the lambda schedule applied to a lambda lever so that you can use different equations for different molecules and different forces in the OpenMM context. This gives a lot of control over how forcefield parameters are scaled with lambda. Specifically, this is used to add support for calculating absolute binding free energies. This is described in the new tutorial chapter.

• Exposed the underlying PerturbableOpenMMMolecule class, which can be created from a merged molecule via mol.perturbation().to_openmm(). This lets you easily see which parameters are changing between the reference and perturbed states. This is described in the tutorial.

• Added the ability for the lambda schedule to show how it will actually act to perturb the parameters of the PerturbableOpenMMMolecule molecule. This is described in the tutorial.

• Added support for reading older somd-style pertfiles, and creating merged molecules from these. This is described in the tutorial.

• Added “not-perturbable” constraints so that bonds and angles that change with lambda are not perturbed. As part of this, have also added a dynamic_constraints option that lets constrained bonds update with lambda, so that they are set to the length corresponding to r0 at that lambda value. Have also changed the constraints so that bonds will be constrained to their r0 value, rather than their current length. These constraints are X-not-perturbed, meaning that it constrains all X, except for bonds or angles involving perturbed atoms. Or X-not-heavy-perturbed, meaning that it constrains all X, except for bonds or angles involving perturbed atoms, unless they involve a hydrogen in any end state. The code to detect hydrogens has been improved, now looking at mass, element and ambertype. There are options to control this, described in the OpenMM detailed guide.

• Added more automatic conversions, so that string will more readily auto-convert to units where possible. Also added a sire.v function to make it easier to create vectors of units, e.g. sire.v("1.0A", "2.0A", "3.0A") will create a sire.maths.Vector(1, 2, 3), while sire.v([3, 4, 5], units="A ps-1") will create a Velocity3D. This is documented in the units cheat sheet.

• You can now set the background color of a 3D view using the bgcolor="..." keyword. This is documented in the view cheat sheet.

• MacOS/ARM64 now includes AmberTools and Gromacs dependencies when built for BioSimSpace (matching MacOS/X64 and Linux).

• Updated the electrostatic softening potential to have an additional shift_coulomb parameter, so that you can control how much the distance is increased by the alpha softening parameter. This was the equivalent of 10 Å, but has been set as default to 1 Å to match the value used in somd.

• Added support for LJ 12-6-4 potentials, plus the ability to read and write LJ parameter exceptions to Amber topology files. This fixes issue #125.

• Added peek support to the datastream reader, so that it can recover when it doesn’t find the magic value it expects on reading.

• Added functionality to SparseMatrix to make it easier to detect when non-default values have been added, and also to set up a matrix which has a concept of unset values.

• Added a to_same_molecule argument to the mol.extract() function, so that it is possible to keep the same molecule number for the extracted molecule. As part of this, also relaxed the requirement that the mol.update(...) function can only be called if the molecule layout is not changed. You can now update even if you have changed the numbers of atoms, residues etc. The to_same_molecule argument is default False, so as not to change any existing behaviour.

• Added lots of convenience functions to sire.morph, as described in the new tutorial. Functions include linking to the reference or perturbed states for all molecules, or extracting all of the reference or perturbed states of all molecules. Also I’ve added functions for zeroing ghost torsions and creating molecules from pertfiles. As part of this, I added an auto_commit argument to the Perturbation link_to_reference and link_to_perturbed functions, which defaults to True. This is a change in behaviour, but it makes the API much easier to use. If you are affected by this, please let us know. It was a little-used part of the code, with the main use case being the replacement with the easier sire.morph.link_to_XXX functions.

• Added ability to create merge molecules for relative free energy calculations via sire.morph.merge() and sire.morph.match(). This is described in the tutorial.

• Added ability to create merge molecules for absolute free energy calculations via sire.morph.decouple() and sire.morph.annihilate(). This is described in the tutorial.

• Added support for residue perturbations and also for mutating residues and parts of molecules using a new “copy and paste” algorithm. This is described in the tutorial.

• Exposed the SOMMContext, PerturbableOpenMMMolecule, OpenMMMetaData and LambdaLever classes to Python, as part of the new sire.convert.openmm module. These are useful if you want more control over OpenMM from Python. In particular, the PerturbableOpenMMMolecule class lets you see all of the parameters that go into the OpenMM forces that involve perturbable molecules. There are useful functions that can be used to get changing parameters as dataframes, which is really useful for debugging. These are described in the new tutorial.

• Preserve user atom names when writing to PDB format.

• Updated the Cursor so that it is easier to get and set the expression used for the potential energy (using the get_potential and set_potential functions).

• Fixed compile error using Python 3.12. This fixes issue #147.

• Optimised the OpenMM minimisation code and making it more robust. This includes vectorising for Apple Silicon and adding more tests for convergence so that we can have more confidence that the structures output are sensible. Also made sure that optimised compilation (-O3) is used for all of the plugins (SireOpenMM, SireGemmi and SireRDKit). They were previously compiled with wrapper options (e.g. -Os). Minimisation now gives better progress updates, using a progress bar to show progress towards the maximum number of iterations. This has been reduced to 1500 by default. Also, if the minimisation fails to create a structure that obeys constraints on the first pass, then the minimisation is repeated, with the maximum number of iterations reset. If it fails again, then this structure, with constraints re-applied, is returned.

• Added more support for Boresch restraints. Specifically, sire.restraints.boresch() now supports the specification of equilibrium values, uses different default force constants, and warns the user if the restraints are likely to be unstable. sire.restraints.get_standard_state_correction() was implemented for Boresch restraints. Tests were added for restraint creation and for the standard state correction. Boresch restraints were added to tutorial.

• Added power support to GeneralUnit in python. You can now raise a unit value to a valid power, e.g. sr.u("5A")**2. You can also square root via a new .sqrt() function on the unit. There is also a new sire.sqrt function that will automatically called obj.sqrt() if that exists, or will fall back to math.sqrt if not. This implements wishlist item #176.

• Conversion to and from RDKit now preserves atoms and residue names and numbers. This makes used of AtomPDBResidueInfo in RDKit to populate metadata when the RDKit molecule is created. On conversion to sire, the atom monomer info will be checked. If it is simple, then only the atom name will be obtained. If it is a AtomPDBResidueInfo, then the atom name and number, and residue name and number (plus any chain information) will be extracted. If no atom name is set, then the value of the property “molFileAlias” will be checked. This implements wishlist item #168.

• Implemented the auto-bonds constraint, which automatically chooses bonds to constrain by comparing the estimated vibrational frequency against the simulation timestep multiplied by the factor auto_bonds_factor (defaults to 10). This is described in the OpenMM detailed guide. This implements wishlist item #185.

• Fixed a bug in the algorithm used to infer bond order when converting to RDKit format. This fixes issue #177.

• Fixed a bug in the LambdaLever class where it was not using the stage-specific value of lambda when using multiple stages where one or more stages contained a standard morph equation.

2023.5.2 - March 2024

• Fix bug that disabled the DEBUG log level from the global logger.

• Fixed bug in :class`sire.legacy.Mol.ResIdxAtomCoordMatcher` by ensuring that we only compare residues with the same number of atoms.

• Added an AtomCoordMatcher to match atoms by coordinates in two selections.

• Added map support to writing perturbable Gromacs topology files. This enables the user to specify which perturbable properties to use, e.g. map={"dihedral0": "dihedral_a", "dihedral1": "dihedral_b"}.

• Code can now detect when an Amber PRMTOP file has discontiguous molecules, and thus when atoms are reordered after load. This information is passed to subsequent frame file parsers that are loaded at the same time, so that they are able to reorder the frames before being added to the atoms. This happens transparently, so that the user doesn’t have to worry about the reordering. This fixes issue #164.

• Fixed a bug where the SDF parser would wrongly try to parse Amber RST7 files that weren’t immediately recognised as such. The fix adds .inpcrd as a recognised extension for Amber RST7 files, and changes the scoring logic of the SDF parser to equal the number of molecules times the number of atoms.

• Switched to using the SYBL atom type to infer the element of an atom when reading Mol2 files. This is more robust than using the atom name. Fixes issue #166.

• Made it easier to convert from strings to elements. Added the ability to customise the list of elements that are considered biological. This fixes issue #170.

2023.5.1 - January 2024

• Added a .dynamics().step(num_steps) function to make it easier to quickly run steps of OpenMM dynamics with minimal overhead (this directly called Integrator.step())

• Some optimisations to the OpenMM layer that make full use of the experimental “updateSomeParametersInContext” functions.

• Updated gemmi to 0.6.4, so that it can be default-enabled on all supported platforms. As part of this, had to change the version of the compilers used on Windows and Linux to make the conda packages. Windows now uses Visual Studio 2022 instead of 2017, and Linux now uses GCC 12.3.0 instead of GCC 13.

2023.5.0 - December 2023

• Added a new sire.options module that contains new sire.options.Option objects to represent configurable options. These include documentation, and make it easier to validate and expose possible values of configurable options. The API docs for Option shows how to create your own Option type. The unit test in tests/options/test_options.py show how to use the options. This is integrated into the sire/OpenMM layer.

• Extended the .atom(s), .residue(s), .bond(s) and all other indexing functions so that you can pass in an existing view or views as the key. This lets you look up views in a container by other views, e.g. mols.bond(mols.atoms()[0], mols.atoms()[1]) would return the bond between the first two atoms in the container mols. Also added a error_on_missing flag to the atoms, residues, bonds etc functions, so that you get a KeyError exception if there is no match, and error_on_missing is True. For example, mols.atoms("element C", error_on_missing=True) would raise an exception if there are no carbon atoms in this container. This is default False to keep existing behaviour, but we would recommend setting this to True and would like to change the default in the future.

• Added sire.convert() support for converting between sire objects and Gemmi objects. This has allowed us to support reading and writing of PDBx/mmCIF files. We’ve updated sire.load() to automatically choose PDBs/mmCIF files if gemmi-support is available. We’ve also added support for the new-style PDB codes (e.g. “pdb_00003nss” instead of “3NSS”). Note that this needs a custom Gemmi package build, where “shared libraries” are turned on. This should be available from conda-forge in 2024, but for now, you will need to clone the Gemmi feedstock and build the conda package yourself. You will then need to recompile sire from source. We will release 2023.5.1 as a conda package once the conda-forge Gemmi package with shared library support is available.

• Optimised the LambdaLever class so that it caches the forcefield parameters calculated at different lambda values. This means that we don’t have to re-calculate the parameters at each lambda update step. This is a significant speed-up for alchemical free energy simulations.

2023.4.2 - December 2023

• Fixed use of QString::compare when comparing molecular properties during a water topology swap.

• Have RST7 return a list of angles from the box_angles() function, rather than a Vector. This prevents the confusing behaviour where the angles are wrongly shown in units of angstroms… This fixes issues #106.

• Added a new sire.maths.rotate() function, and added the option (default True) to rotate velocities as well as coordinates when usign a cursor to rotate molecule views. This fixes issue #103.

• Fix validation of perturbable_constraint dynamics option when the string includes hyphens. This fixes issue #130.

• Fix streaming of TriclinicBox objects. This fixes issue #128.

• Fix the sire to OpenMM conversion so that null LJ parameters will never have a zero sigma value. They will either be sigma=1/epsilon=0 for non-perturbable atoms, or sigma=1e-9/epsilon=1e-9 for perturbable atoms.

• Now catch std::bad_alloc and raise it as a MemoryError. This means that we can catch out-of-memory errors and raise a more informative exception.

• Fixed the bug where the wrong return type from .minimisation() and .dynamics() was returned. This fixes issue #137.

• Fixed the bug where the cutoff would not be set correctly if a string was passed. You can now do mol.dynamics(cutoff="10A") or mol.dynamics(cutoff="infinite") and it will be processed correctly. This also required adding a map.unset("key") option to PropertyMap, to make it easier to unset mapped properties.

2023.4.1 - October 2023

• Fixed regression introduced in 2023.4.0 that meant that removed the constraints from water molecules that had no internal bonds. These waters would blow up as there was nothing holding them together. The need for these constraints is now better detected and explicitly added.

• Significantly sped up the OpenMM layer by checking for similar constraint lengths and matching them all to be the same (within 0.05 A for calculated constraints, e.g. unbonded atoms or angle constraints) or to R0 for bonds where the bond length is within 0.1 A of R0 and the molecule isn’t perturbable.

• Added a custom minimiser that is based on OpenMM’s LocalEnergyMinimizer, but that copes better with exclusion errors, and that has deep integration with the progress bar / interuption system.

• Fixed a bug where the exclusions and exceptions were mismatched for the OpenMM CPU platform, leading to exclusion errors.

• Fixed an issue where the vacuum dynamics and minimisation simulations still had a spurious periodic box added when .commit() was called.

2023.4.0 - October 2023

• Added closest and furthest keywords to enable searching for the n closest or furthest views. This is very general, and is described in the detailed search guide. Searches such as closest 10 waters to protein or furthest (residue in protein) from water are supported.

• Added a sire.minimum_distance() function to calculate the minimum distance between atoms of two views.

• Added support for perturbable molecules to the OpenMM converter. Have addded LambdaLever and LambdaSchedule classes that can be used to control how forcefield parameters are changed with lambda. These levers change the parameters in the OpenMM context, enabling simulations at different values of lambda to be performed. This is initial functionality which will be documented and expanded by subsequent PRs.

• Added support for softening potentials used to smooth creation and deletion of ghost atoms during alchemical free energy simulations. Added a new sire.morph module that includes functions that should make it easier to set up, view and control morphs (perturbations).

• Forced all new-style modules to import when sr.use_new_api() is called. This will make it easier to use sire with multiprocessing.

• Added option to allow GROMACS water molecules to be flagged as crystal waters. This means that they will be ignored by gmx genion when choosing water molecules to replace with ions.

• Added the ability to align trajectories and views against molecule views or containers. Added the sire.mol.AtomMapping class to control how to map from atoms in one group of molecules to another. This can be used to align trajectories and views against atoms / molecules that are not part of that trajectory.

• Added the sire.mol.TrajectoryIterator.rmsd() function to make it easier to calculate RMSDs across trajectories. The RMSD can be calculated against all atoms, a subset of atoms, or even against a different set of atoms that are matched via an AtomMapping object. Full details in the tutorial.

• Significantly optimised the loading of trajectory frames and of updating properties in molecules. Switched from CentralCache to a new LazyEvaluator class that uses tbb::collaborative_call to lazy-calculate the results of functions in a thread-safe and thread-cooperative manner. Moved PropertyMap to use a shared pointer to assigned properties (removing costs of unnecessary allocations and deallocations) and added update and updateFrom functions to Properties and MoleculeData so that properties can be updated in place, thereby minimising new/free.

• Fixed a bug that prevented mols.trajectory().view() from working. You can now view trajectory subsets again, e.g. mols.trajectory()[0:5].view().

• Updated FreeEnergyAnalysis.py to be compatible with both the new pymbar 4 API and the old pymbar 3 API.

• Added support for restraints to the OpenMM dynamics layer. Initial tested support for positional and distance/bond restraints is included, as well as experimental support for Boresch restraints. The restraint are documented in the tutorial. This also documents new code to let you specify atoms that should be fixed in space.

• Added support for alchemical restraints to the OpenMM dynamics layer. This lets you scale restraints as part of a λ-coordinate. This is documented in the tutorial. Restraints can be named, meaning that you can scale different restraints at different stages and by different values across the λ-coordinate.

• Added an EnergyTrajectory class that lets us record the energy trajectory along a dynamics simulation. This includes recording energies at different λ-windows to that being simulated, thereby providing the raw data for free energy calculations. By default the EnergyTrajectory is returned to the user as a pandas DataFrame.

• Added the ability to export an EnergyTrajectory as an alchemlyb-compatible data frame. Added sire.morph.to_alchemlyb() to convert lots of EnergyTrajectory objects (or files containing s3 streams) into a single alchemlyb-compatible data frame that is ready for analysis. You can now calculate relative hydration and binding free energies and analyse the results using alchemlyb. This is documented in the tutorial.

• Added a sire.morph.repartition_hydrogen_masses() to make it easier to repartition hydrogen masses during alchemical free energy simulations. Set the default mass factor to 1.5 to support a 4 fs timestep with the default LangevinMiddleIntegrator.

• Added support for an Andersen thermostat in the OpenMM dynamics layer.

• Added support for scaling intramolecular non-bonded scale factors to the LambdaLever, so that we have rudimentary support for perturbations that involve bond breaking and forming.

• Added support to somd for one or more “permanent” distance restraints. These are distance restraints that are always applied, and are never scaled by λ. This allows the release of all other distance restraints to a single harmonic or flat-bottomed restraint. When the ligand is fully decoupled, the free energy of release of the single remaining restraint can be computed without simulation. See <https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jctc.3c00139> for more details.

2023.3.2 - September 2023

• Made sure that a title is written to an AmberRst file, even if the system has no name (issue #99).

• Modularise the TriclinicBox lattice rotation and reduction functionality and make both optional. (PR #102).

• Updated default units so that units of pressure default to printing out in units of atmospheres

2023.3.1 - July 2023

• Fixed a bug in analyse_freenrg which produced incorrect TI results when not all lambda windows were run for equal lengths of time.

• Make sure atom serial number in PDB files are capped when renumbering when TER records are present.

• Fixed a bug in the AmberRst parser where velocities were written with the wrong unit (A ps-1 instead of AKMA time). Also added the correct labels to the AmberRst file.

• Fixed a bug where outputs from legacy script would be written with base physical units, rather than prettier internal or SI units.

• Fixed a bug in the writing of DCD headers, meaning that the files couldn’t be read by other DCD reader software (written non-compliant header)

• Fixed a bug in the trajectory measure code, where the ProgressBar class was not being properly imported (fix_88).

• Fixed a deadlock in the file trajectory loading code. This was because multiple threads trying to read the same frame lead to starvation of the thread that had progressed to read the frame. Now a single thread loads the frame, with subsequent threads using this cached load (fix_88).

• Optimised the speed of viewing large molecules in NGLView, plus of searching for water molecules. Added a new is_water function. Optimised the find function in SelectorM<T> so that it is not an O(N^2) search. It is now roughly O(N), using a hash to lookup at the molecule level, so that we don’t have to test individual atoms.

• Fixed StandardStateCorrection. This stopped working after the commit https://github.com/OpenBioSim/sire/commit/e2e370940894315838fb8f65e141baaf07050ce0, because not all required changes were included.

• Fix for crash when not passing a map to the SelectorImproper constructor

• Fix for crash when checking a list of atoms rather than a list of molecules

2023.3.0 - June 2023

• Added alignment and smoothing options to trajectory views (and trajectory processing). You can now align a trajectory against any search string, can wrap molecules into boxes, and can smooth coordinates across multiple frames. This is described in the new detailed trajectory guide.

• Rewrote many of the “frame” trajectory parsers, and consolidated all of these parsers on top of the new “Trajectory” / “Frame” design. All trajectory frames are now streamed on demand from disk, and are not saved in memory (except for a small cache). Loading and scanning through the frames of a trajectory is massively optimised, and now quite fast :-)

• Used the same framework to all streamed saving of trajectory frames to disk. Trajectories can be written in parallel. Frame data comes either directly from the underlying molecular data, or can come from the result of aligning, wrapping or smoothing the trajectory. Because loading and saving is streamed, this means we can easily and quickly convert one trajectory format to another without consuming much memory. Indeed, parallel streaming means that we can write multiple new formats at the same time.

• As part of this, we now support a wider range of trajectory file formats. We support Amber RST (NetCDF), Amber TRAJ, Gromacs TRR, Gromacs XTC and DCD.

• We have also added code to allow any single-frame format to be used to load and save trajectories. This is a little experimental still, but supports writing out the frames of a trajectory to several individual files in a directory. Sire will automatically recognise these directories on load, and will stream-load the frames as needed.

• Added full smarts and smiles searching support, including proper returning and querying of sub-structure matches. This is described in the search guide and new tutorial.

• Re-worked the progress bar, and how sire communicates from the C++ layer up to the Python layer. Progress bars are now created in C++ and are thread-safe. They propogate up to the Python layer, meaning that they render and update even though the C++ function is running (often in parallel). The Python GIL is correctly released and recovered around these functions and around progress bar updates. This makes it much easier to use progress bars, as well as making it easier to interupt long-running C++ functions (they catch and respond to the break signal in a signal handler that alerts the progress bar, so it raises an interupt_exception at the next update). This is all thread safe, meaning that child threads can create progress bars that become children of their parent’s bars, with them all rendering correctly. The progress bars are currently used for the trajectory saving code, and the OpenMM MD and minimisation code. We will develop them further (and make them prettier) in future releases.

• Added better handling of System, so that we don’t lose system-level properties or the system name during manipulations. This was achieved by better calling these functions on the underlying sire.legacy.System.System object, and not dropping straight to SelectorMol. Also added space() and time() functions (with appropriate set_space and set_time) to more easily see and change the system space and time.

• Added “shared properties” to System. These are properties which will be automatically copied into contained molecules (and kept up to date if they are changed). The space and time properties are default “shared”. You can add or remove shared properties via new functions add_shared_property() and remove_shared_property().

• Cleaned up the sanitisation of molecules generated by smiles strings. This now raises an exception if the molecule can’t be sanitised. You can switch this off by passing must_sanitize=False to sire.smiles(), thereby only running the sanitisation steps that pass.

• Improved functionality of harmonic restraints in openMMMD. Each restrained atom will now have to a corrsponding dummy atom, with the location of this dummy atom restraining the real atom. This makes restrained systems consistent in NPT regimes. Provided that a modified system containing the dummy atoms is given, the argument use restraints = True can be added to a SOMD .cfg file, along with the argument restrained atoms containing a dictionary of dummy atom numbers along with the numbers of the corresponding real atoms ({dummy_atom_num:real_atom_num}).

• Added a new units grammar and parser, so that we can robustly read physical quantities (units) from strings. This is a complete grammar, meaning that the full range of physical units, SI prefixes, long and short forms, unicode and ASCII representations are supported. A convenient sire.u() function has been added to easily convert its arguments to sire.units.GeneralUnit, e.g. timestep = sr.u("25ps") or m = sr.u("25km").to("miles"). This even supports automatic conversion from other units systems (e.g. you can pass pint units to sr.u to convert to GeneralUnit). This is described in full in the new units detailed guide.

• We have begun to add automatic conversion from strings to unit-quantities (or from any unit system) to functions. Currently the dynamics functions are supported, e.g. you can type d = mols.dynamics(timestep="4fs") and d.run("500ps") (or even, d = mols.dynamics(timestep={pint time})). We will add more in the next release, with the ambition that every function that accepts a unit argument will automatically convert from pint, a string, or any other supported units framework.

• As part of this, we have also updated the way physical units are printed. Units will now always be printed in the default format specified by the user, with default base units used for any composed unit that has not been specified. You set a default unit using sire.units.set_default_unit() or sire.units.set_default_units(), e.g. sr.units.set_default_unit("nm") would change the default length unit to nm. You can set combined units, e.g. sr.units.set_default_unit("kcal mol-1 A-2") would set the default bond force constant units to kcal mol-1 A-2. The framework automatically works out the unit, and will print out any value in that unit if the future in the default unit, with the string supplied by the user as the unit name. This is all described in the units detailed guide (including sire.units.set_si_units() and sire.units.set_internal_units()).

• Added make_whole() functions to all views, so that molecules can be recombined after being split across periodic boundaries. You can automatically make molecules whole on load by passing {"make_whole": True} as a map to sire.load() or the load_frame() functions. Or, you can manually make molecules whole by calling make_whole() on System, or mol = mol.move().make_whole().commit() on any view.

• Significantly accelerated the reading and writing of files, especially Amber topology files.

• Enhanced the integration with NGLView by making it easy to choose colours and opacities of representations (e.g. see the detailed guide).

• Various compile fixes so that sire compiles and works well with GCC 13.

• Lots of bug fixes, including fix_67, fix_49 (Triclinic box angles flipping during a trajectory), and fix_44.

2023.2.3 - May 2023

• Fixed numerical precision issues caused by lattice reduction of triclinic lattice box vectors to prevent oscillation of the box angles. This is caused by the fixed-width format for box dimensions and angles used in the molecular input files. PR 51 - fix_49_50

• Added a run_constrained entry for the optional rdkit dependency in our conda recipe using a minor level pin. This ensures that the correct version of rdkit is installed alongside sire, i.e. one that is compatible with the version that sire was built against. PR 51 - fix_49_50

2023.2.2 - April 2023

• Fixed random crashes when loading Amber PRMTOP files when parallelisation was enabled. PR 45 - fix_44

• Fixed failure to read an Amber PRMTOP file when no atom names or residues names are set. PR 43 - fix_42

• Edited GitHub Actions workflow so that builds of devel automatically upload to the dev channel, while builds of main automatically upload to the test channel (for testing before being re-labelled to the main channel)

2023.2.1 - April 2023

• Added in openmmtools as a host requirement. This allows it to be installed in the same environment as sire. Note that this changes the dependencies of sire to use an older version of libnetcdf. PR 34

• Reactivated the parallel processing code in the Amber parameter/topology parser. This significantly speeds up reading and writing of Amber parameter/topology files.

• Fixed compile issues with some MacOS compilers using the C++ 2017 standard, when std::unary_function has been removed.

• Fixed the lookup of Gromacs wildcard dihedrals of the form A-*-*-D.

• Added full support for Urey-Bradley terms in the Gromacs topology parser.

• Added full support for harmonic improper angles in the Gromacs topology parser. Note that we don’t yet have support for these in the molecular mechanic engine or the openmm converter, so they can only currently be read and written.

• Added a developer check for when the version number has changed, so that people compiling manually know when they have to rebuild from scratch.

2023.2.0 - March 2023

• Completed the sire.convert framework for interconverting sire objects with BioSimSpace, RDKit and OpenMM. This is now fully documented in a tutorial.

• Added support for creating molecules from smiles strings, or generating smiles strings from molecules, based on the RDKit integration. Have also added a view2d() function that generates two-dimensional structure views of molecules. These have infered bond orders, formal charges and stereochemistries. This is documented in two tutorials.

• Added new support to the 3D view code to give control over the representation used to view the molecule (e.g. licorice, spacefill, cartoon etc). This is documented in full (together with more detail about 2D views) in a detailed guide.

• Added support for performing minimisation and molecular dynamics simulations based on the OpenMM integration. This is documented in full via both a tutorial and a detailed guide.

• Fixed the Amber PRMTOP dihedral ring bug.

• Fixed the bug regarding preservation of water properties when changing topology.

• Fixed the bug that caused simulation restarts from short waterswap jobs to fail.

• Added versioned package support to sire.utils.try_import(). Now the version of the package to be installed can be specified.

• Moved pymbar from a run to host dependency, and switched analyse_freenrg to use try_import() to import the module. sire now doesn’t depend on pymbar<4. Instead, pymbar will be installed at run-time if analyse_freenrg is used in mbar mode.

• Updated the list of build, run and host dependencies to reduce the number of pinned dependencies for sire. This included fixing the way we specify blas so that we don’t force a pin to openblas, removing the requirement for watchdog as it is not used any more, removing pypdb from the BioSimSpace run requirements, and switching to qt-main rather than the entire qt package. Our run dependencies are now just boost, gsl, lazy_import, libnetcdf, openmm, pandas, qt-main, rich and tbb.

• Updated the name of the TIP4P template to match convention.

• Added a utility function used by BioSimSpace to remove specified named properties from all molecules in a collection.

• Fixed the bug in the Gro87 parser whereby garbage velocities were written for molecules that didn’t have a velocity property. These will now be given a default velocity of zero.

• Added an option that can be used to fix an atom numbering issue when writing PDB files that involve TER records and multiple molecules.

• Added a fix to replace spaces in GROMACS molecular topology names with underscores, so that topology files written by sire can be read by GROMACS.

• Added the sire.system.ForceFieldInfo class to hold and report metadata related to the forcefields used to calculate energies and perform molecular dynamics. This is now used to parse and interpret this metadata, giving consistency between the new OpenMM-based dynamics code and the energy functions that used the in-built molecular mechanics engine.

• Added a fix for better handling of AtomRadii-based properties. This helps ensure that radii will be given lengths by default, even if they are initialised with zero values.

• Removed the global warnings filter as this was no longer needed. sire will now not automatically filter out all warnings.

• Updated Console to use the in-built spinner from rich rather than one based on yaspin. This removes a dependency and also better integrates the spinner code.

• Added Python 3.10 support and now build Python 3.10 packages. This is now the default version of Python for sire, and the version we recommend for new workflows. Note that we will drop automatic building of Python 3.8 packages later this year (likely Q3 or Q4). This will be timed to co-incide with when we add Python 3.11 support, and when (we anticipate) conda-forge will drop Python 3.8. Our aim is to only build packages for a maximum of 3 Python versions at a time.

• Added the future branch for feature branches that are accepted, but not yet ready for the next release. Adopting a more regular release and bugfix process based on a quarterly release cycle.

2023.1.3 - February 2023

• Added the beginnings of the new sire.convert framework for converting between different molecule object formats. Created initial converters for RDKit, so that we can convert sire molecules to RDKit molecules. This is still considered experimental. It will be cleaned up fully for 2023.2.0. It has been added now to let others play with this code, to refine a workable API.

• Used the RDKit code to create a sire.smiles() function to create molecules from smiles strings. This is still considered experimental. It will be cleaned up fully for 2023.2.0. It has been added to let others begin to explore how this capability could be useful.

• Used the RDKit code to create a view2d() function for quickly creating 2D views of molecules (or all molecules in a container / system). Again, this is considered experimental. It will be cleaned up fully for 2023.2.0. It has been added to let others beging to explore how this capability could be useful.

• Fixed the SDF bug reported in issue #8.

• Fixed a bug in writing Amber PRMTOP files, where atoms with index zero should not be written to the third or fourth column of dihedral / improper entries.

• Adjusted the cutoffs and schemes so that the energy() function gives energies that closely agree with those reported by pmemd. Added a unit test that validates this.

• Added an extract() function so that it is easy to create a new molecule as a subset of another molecule (and the same for molecule containers)

• Switched fully to need a C++ 2017 compiler, and adapted the code to fully support C++ 2017. Added guards to reduce the number of spurious compiler warnings emitted by dependencies of sire during a compile.

• Fixed bugs related to null space parameters specified for triclinic spaces.

• Added classes at the C++ level to represent Stereochemistry, Hybridization Chirality, and BondOrder. These are used by the RDKit code and the SDF parser. These will be fully exposed in a later release.

2023.1.2 - February 2023

• Used clang-format to autoformat all the C++ files.

• Fixed SDF pickle bug (molecules read from SDF files could not be pickled / unpickled)

• Fixed the bugs in waterswap that led to incorrect energies being calculated.

• Fixed bugs in analyse_freenrg that prevented it from running on newly generated simfiles.

• Fixed a segfault when searching for non-existant atoms in a molecule editor.

2023.1.1 - January 2023

• Fix incompatibility between the updated code and the Boresch restraint code.

• Fixes try_import so that it works within a conda environment, and so that it only uses conda or mamba to install dependencies.

• Fixed NaN values of r0 for null amber bonds and angles. Now the value of r0 is taken from the current bond length, or else the options keep_null_bonds=False or keep_null_angles=False can be passed via a map to prevent the writing of null bonds and angles to amber parameter files.

• Fixed a bug in sire.save() that meant that the save directory was ignored when the format was specified. Files will now save into the correct directory.

• Updated the instructions for writing unit tests to say how to use fixtures to load files, and how to use tmpdir to write files to a temporary directory during a test.

• Addition of lots of files, e.g. issue templates, pull request templates, security file etc to improve community engagement via GitHub.

• Created sire_bigtests from SireUnitTests and created an integration testing pipeline based on these tests. Now the latest devel release can be tested via sire_bigtests as an extra validation check before creating a release. This release has been checked this way :-)

• Lots of minor bugfixes related to those checks, e.g. mostly relating to fixing paths on Windows. Now all the integration tests pass on Windows (something not before attained, as running the tests on Windows was not easy).

2023.1.0 - January 2023

• Initial release of the OpenBioSim version of sire. The code has been completely refurbished using a tutorial-driven development process and has a new public API. This is now sire, rather than Sire. The new API is activated when you import from this module. You can still use the old API by calling sire.use_old_api() or sire.use_mixed_api(). The new API is pythonic in style, with our aim to be fully PEP8 compliant. Functions are named in snake_case, with classes in CapitalCase. Modules are all in lowercase. Only a portion of the legacy Sire API has been exposed publicly. You can access unexposed classes / functions via sire.legacy.Module, e.g. sire.legacy.Mol.Connectivity will get access to the Sire.Mol.Connectivity class.

• We have a new website with easy install instructions, a quickstart guide and a comprehensive tutorial. This is built using sphinx from the files in the doc directory.

• Migrated from michellab/sire to openbiosim/sire. The new repo has had old large files removed, and so is much smaller, and so quicker and easier to clone.

• Added a find() function to all of the molecule view containers. This returns the index of the view(s) within the container. This can be used to quickly get the index of, e.g. atoms in a system via mols.atoms().find(atom).

• Made sure that all units and constants were exposed to the new public API, and that the constants were exposed with units, e.g. now sire.units.k_boltz * (25 * sire.units.celsius) gives 0.592486 kcal mol-1 (be careful to put brackets around the temperature, or it will be 25*k_boltz multiplied by 1 celsius).

• Made sure that the Rich console is initialised at module import time if the new API is used.

• Moved show_warnings to default True when loading files. This now prints out the method to silence warnings. This is better for, e.g. loading gromacs topologies, which were too noisy when show_warning was False and a message told you how to turn them on…

• Added sse2neon so that we can use the manually vectorised code on ARM64 systems. This fixed issues with Linux/ARM64. This is as fast, if not faster, than relying on openmp::simd as we did before.

• Cleaned up the new sire API via use of __all__ in all of the new modules. The public API is very limited at the moment, but will grow as we port in more classes. However, the aim is that users will mostly not create classes directly, but will instead implicitly create them as they load molecular systems and call functions on those systems.

• Fully updated the search functionality, making it more robust, more consistent and more powerful. Added a detailed guide on the search grammar to the new website.

• Added a set of Cursor classes for editing, and made these work consistently with most of the property types. Getting and setting properties should now be easier, with auto-wrapping and expanding of properties.

• Made the AtomProperty classes behave more like standard python containers. This makes them easier to work with, and is the first step to hiding them completely (they will eventually be auto-converted to/from standard Python containers or NumPy arrays).

• Added apply() and apply_reduce() functions that let you map functions across all objects in a molecular container.

• Cleaned up the handling of units - now everything maps into GeneralUnit and GeneralUnitProperty, which are auto-converted when exposed to Python. Added Python wrapping and monkey-patching to Vector so that it has length units. Improved the printing of units to the screen (using the correct unicode). Added functions that empower the user to choose their own default units, e.g. changing angstroms to picometers, or switching to full SI units. This only impacts the Python layer when rendering the unit, or auto-converting numbers to units, so does not break or change the C++ layer. Any view can now be assigned a GeneralUnit property.

• Added Bond, Angle, Dihedral, Improper and their related molecule view container classes (e.g. SelectorBond, SelectorMBond etc). This allows you to have molecule views that represent bonds, angles and dihedrals (or collections of these). Added measurement functions so that you can easily get their lengths or sizes.

• Added energy() to let you calculate energies of views (or views with views). This uses the parameters / forcefield loaded with the molecule(s). You can get energies of any views of sub-views. Also created an proper return type for energies that embeds the energy components. Now view.energy().components() works as you would expect.

• Added energies() to molecule containers so that you can get the energies of each view in the container. Added support for progress bars using Rich so that the user has an indication of progress.

• Added initial support for trajectories. Reworked the molecular parser so that multiple “frame” types files will load multiple frames of a trajectory (e.g. so that a trajectory can be loaded from multiple PDB files, or from multiple DCD or traj files). Added a TrajectoryIterator class that lets you easily iterate over and query trajectories. Fully documented this in the tutorial. You can now do cool things like measure bonds over trajectories, or evaluate energies.

• Added a view() function based on NGLView that lets you easily see any molecule view (or collection of molecule views). Added a save_to_string() function that writes a text-based molecule file to an in-memory string rather than a file (so that you don’t have to use temporary files with NGLView). Added support for viewing trajectories, so that trajectories that are loaded in sire are also playable in NGLView.

• Added movement functions to the Cursor classes so that you can more easily move molecules (or molecule views). Documented this in the tutorial. Re-worked the way PropertyMap is passed via Python. Now have a create_map() function that can create a PropertyMap from anything that is passed. This has some examples in its documentation that show how is can be used. Made sure that all of the new functionality can use PropertyMap and uses create_map() to support function calls like cursor.translate( (1,2,3), map={"coordinates":"coords2"} ).

• Speaking of which, also updated Vector adding in functions that allow auto-conversion of list-like python objects to Vector. It should almost be the case that a user will not have to use this class directly themselves, as things should just auto-convert. Added support for creating Vectors from plain numbers or length units, using the default length unit if plain numbers are used.

• Removed lots of unnecessary files. Moved some files into the website docs so that there is a single source of truth. Updated paths and links to point to the new locations in OpenBioSim. Fixed CI build issues on Windows by building in the right directory. Updated the pythonizing framework so that we only pythonize the C++ layer, and avoid the circular dependencies that were causing random import errors (particularly on Windows).

• Fixed lots of bugs and expanded the unit test suite to test the above functionality.

GitHub (michellab): June 22nd 2015 - January 2023

Thanks to @ppxasjsm and @jmichel80 development was migrated into the michellab organisation on GitHub.

This comprised 2495 commits, from developers @lohedges, @chryswoods, @ppxasjsm, @halx, @jmichel80, @ptosco, @SofiaBariami, @fjclark, @Steboss, @nigel-palmer, @msuruzon and @kexul.

Here is the changelog for this stage of development.

[2023.0.3] January 2023: Added the beginnings of a new sphinx-based website

(in the doc folder), which includes the sire API documentation. Cleaned up the new sire API via use of __all__ in all of the new modules. The public API is very limited at the moment, but will grow as we port in more classes. However, the aim is that users will mostly not create classes directly, but will instead implicitly create them as they load molecular systems and call functions on those systems. Added a tutorial to this website that will be used to demonstrate and teach the new sire API. Fully updated the search functionality, making it more robust, more consistent and more powerful. Added a detailed guide on the search grammar to the new website. Added a set of Cursor classes for editing, and made these work consistently with most of the property types. Getting and setting properties should now be easier, with auto-wrapping and expanding of properties. Made the AtomProperty classes behave more like standard python containers. This makes them easier to work with, and is the first step to hiding them completely (they will eventually be auto-converted to/from standard Python containers or NumPy arrays. Added apply and apply_reduce functions that let you map functions across all objects in a molecular container. Cleaned up the handling of units - now everything maps into GeneralUnit and GeneralUnitProperty, which are auto-converted when exposed to Python. Added Python wrapping and monkey-patching to sire.maths.Vector so that it has length units. Improved the printing of units to the screen (using the correct unicode). Added functions that empower the userto choose their own default units, e.g. changing angstroms to picometers, or switching to full SI units. This only impacts the Python layer when rendering the unit, or auto-converting numbers to units, so does not break or change the C++ layer. Any view can now be assigned a GeneralUnit property. Added Bond, Angle, Dihedral, Improper and their related molecule view container classes (e.g. SelectorBond, SelectorMBond etc). This allows you to have molecule views that represent bonds, angles and dihedrals (or collections of these). Added measurement functions so that you can easily get their lengths or sizes. Added energy() to let you calculate energies of views (or views with views). This uses the parameters / forcefield loaded with the molecule(s). You can get energies of any views of sub-views. Also created an proper return type for energies that embeds the energy components. Now view.energy().components() works as you would expect. Added energies() to molecule containers so that you can get the energies of each view in the container. Added support for progress bars using Rich so that the user has an indication of progress. Added initial support for trajectories. Reworked the molecular parser so that multiple “frame” types files will load multiple frames of a trajectory (e.g. so that a trajectory can be loaded from multiple PDB files, or from multiple DCD or traj files). Added a TrajectoryIterator class that lets you easily iterate over and query trajectories. Fully documented this in the tutorial. You can now do cool things like measure bonds over trajectories, or evaluate energies. Added a view() function based on NGLView that lets you easily see any molecule view (or collection of molecule views). Added a save_to_string function that writes a text-based molecule file to an in-memory string rather than a file (so that you don’t have to use temporary files with NGLView). Added support for viewing trajectories, so that trajectories that are loaded in sire are also playable in NGLView. Added movement functions to the Cursor classes so that you can more easily move molecules (or molecule views). Documented this in the tutorial. Re-worked the way PropertyMap is passed via Python. Now have a sire.base.create_map function that can create a PropertyMap from anything that is passed. This has some examples in its documentation that show how is can be used. Made sure that all of the new functionality can use PropertyMap and uses create_map to support function calls like cursor.translate( (1,2,3), map={“coordinates”:”coords2”} ). Speaking of which, also updated sire.maths.Vector adding in functions that allow auto-conversion of list-like python objects to sire.maths.Vector. It should almost be the case that a user will not have to use this class directly themselves, as things should just auto-convert. Added support for creating Vectors from plain numbers or length units, using the default length unit if plain numbers are used. Fixed lots of bugs and expanded the unit test suite to test the above functionality. Removed lots of unnecessary files. Moved some files into the website docs so that there is a single source of truth. Began the process of updating paths and links to point to the new locations in OpenBioSim. Fixed CI build issues on Windows by building in the right directory. Updated the pythonizing framework so that we only pythonize the C++ layer, and avoid the circular dependencies that were causing random import errors (particularly on Windows).

[2023.0.2] December 2022: Fix multiple distance restraint bug in SOMD

(@fjclark). Add support for PME FEP with SOMD and fix associated bugs (@halx, @jmichel80). Fix CI issues so that PRs use the correct URL when triggered by external forks. Exclude dummy atoms when repartitioning hydrogen masses. Deprecate py37.

[2023.0.1] November 2022: Improve handling of HETATM and TER records in

PDB files. Fix SOMD selection issues following update to the 2023 API. Fix writing of steps to SOMD simfile.dat (@fjclark). Throw exception when CHAMBER format AMBER topology files are detected. Expose toVector() method for the velocity property. Match against inverted dihedral records of for A-B-C-A when building GROMACS topologies. Fixed calling of static Py++ functions. Build against conda-forge AmberTools and GROMACS packages as host requirements, allowing users to create BioSimSpace environments with or without these dependencies installed. Added the ability to search on whether or not a property exists. Make sure searches are returned in MolIdx order. Ensure Sire is built against packages with the “dev” label.

[2023.0.0] July 2022 - Updated Sire’s API to a more pythonic style.

Module names are in lower case, e.g. import Sire becomes import sire, or import sire as sr. Functions are in underscore_case. This change is not backwards compatible. To support old code, a sire.use_old_api() function has been added. New functions have been added that make it easier to load and save molecules. These can load from URLs. Tests have been updated to pytest and now load input data from the sire website. The search system has been overhauled, optimised and updated. This is described in the new tutorials that are in the process of being written in the doc directory. This also contains the new sphinx website. The CMakeLists.txt files and build system have been completely reworked. These now use more pythonic setup.py scripts. These have been updated to fully support MacOS M1 and Windows. The conda recipe has been updated to use these scripts. Conda packages are now built and supported across Linux, MacOS and Windows.

[2022.3.0] June 2022 - Added support for parsing SDF files (@chryswoods).

Move conda build process to Miniforge and mambdabuild (boa) to avoid timeouts and memory issues. Update GroTop parser to ensure new atom types are created when names match but parameters differ. Added additional BioSimSpace wrapper to update coordinates and velocities in a system, without first requiring that it is modified to have unique atom and residue numbers. Use -Oz compiler flag rather than -Os for compiling Python wrappers to avoid “illegal hardware instruction” error with Clang 14 on macOS x86_64. Fixed issue reconstructing triclinic box objects from a binary data stream. Added missing streaming operators to Sire.Unit.GeneralUnit.

[2022.2.0] March 2022 - Fixed formatting of SOLVENT_POINTERS flag in

AmberPrm7 parser. Removed duplicate definition of sigma_av in OpenMMFreEnergySt.cpp. Fixed SOMD issues related to assumption that perturbable molecule always has MolIdx(1) (@fjclark). Fixed wrappers and added significant performance enhancements to the SireIO::updateCoordinatesAndVelocities function. This significantly (200x) speeds up the remapping of coordinates/velocities from SOMD trajectory frames, which was a bottleneck for large protein-ligand simulations within BioSimSpace. Disabled GSL error handling to avoid a potential segmentation fault within a singular value decomposition routine called by SireMaths::align.

[2022.1.0] Jan 2022 - Fixed counting of protons to account for dummy atoms

when swapping water topology and ensure that original molecular properties are preserved. Added a fallback to the BGFS solver to improve robustness of FEP analysis (@kexul). Fixed a bug that caused distance restraints to be skipped if the ligand wasn’t the first molecule in the FEP topology (@jmichel80, @fjclark). Improved atomic element inference in AMBER parsers. Update Sire build to latest versions of dependencies on macOS and Linux. This required substantial mini-changes across the entire codebase due to changes in APIs and deprecations. This includes moving away from qAlgorithm, using the new Qt container constructors, moving to OneAPI, switching to the conda-forge OpenMM and switching to the new C++ ABI (@chryswoods). Simplified Sire wrapper generation using a minimal Docker container with the latest Py++ (@chryswoods). Add support for native Python pickling of Sire objects (@chryswoods.) Switch to GitHub actions for CI. This uses a conda-forge compliant conda build, with packages then uploaded to the Anaconda cloud.

[2021.1.0] Aug 2021 - Added support for multiple combining rules in SOMD

(@SofiaBariami). Added support for triclinic simulation boxes. Convert Ryckaert-Bellememans form dihedral functions from GROMACS to Fourier series to allow conversion to AMBER format. Updated search functionality to enable searching for objects within an arbitrary distance of a point. Fixed PDB2 parser bug to ensure that residue names are fixed width. Ensure that NUMEXTRA pointer is written so that AMBER topology files can be read by tools such as ParmEd. Write NATYP pointer and correct number of SOLTY flags. Even though these aren’t used, incorrect values break external tools, e.g. ParmEd. Added support for AMBER TIP5P water topology conversion. Correctly flag OPLS style force fields when creating MMDetail object so that users can reconstruct OPLS systems written to AMBER format. Made build Python 3.8+ compliant. (Python libraries are now ABI compatible.) Switched to using std::atomic since tbb/atomic.h is now deprecated. Switched to using HTTPS for sending analytics. Updated build to be able to link against conda version of libcpuid. Added support for generating PDB CONECT records from a Sire.Mol.Connectivity object. Fixed issue with PMEMD skipping torsions with zero periodicity. Fixed random number seeding bug in somd-freenrg, which resulted in the OpenMM generator being seeded with the same seed for each cycle of the simulation.

[2020.1.0] July 2020 - Fixed bug in WaterView program to ensure that a

molecule is extracted from the returned list. Stable sorting of dihedrals and other potential terms to allow reproducible writing of input files for SOMD (@ptosco). Updated the FreeEnergyAnalysis script to support different versions of the pymbar API. Significant performance improvement to the GroTop parser by looping over cut-groups during non-bonded matrix evaluation. Updated Miniconda and conda dependencies to latest cross-compatible versions. Fixed minor copiler and runtime issues (@nigel-cresset).

[2019.3.0] November 2019 - Added functionality to restrict the search space

when finding paths between atoms or searching for rings. Fixed performance issue in GroTop parser caused by an N^2 loop over atoms when searching the intrascale matrix. We now loop over cut-groups, which is far more efficient. Fixed issues with Python wrapper generation caused by issues with missing define symbols and a bug in the scanheaders.py script.

[2019.2.1] October 2019 - Updated the Conda recipe to pin the dependencies

of dependencies that are used at run time since Conda doesn’t automatically do this for you. Added instructions detailing the Azure Pipeline build process and how to create a new release.

[2019.2.0] September 2019 - Updated the Gromacs topology writer to support

perturbable molecules containing a variable number of bonds. Created a Docker container for building wrappers and updated to using CastXML. Added support for running background processes on Windows (@ptosco). Updated SOMD Python wrapper to write restart files every cycle to simplify system monitoring in BioSimSpace. Fixed macOS build issue by not linking against libpython. Made sure that Conda dependencies are pinned correctly to avoid compatibility issues. Fixed bug that prevented upload statistics being sent and added support for tracking BioSimSpace usage.

[2019.1.0] May 2019 - Updates to the Gromacs topology writer to support

free energy perturbation simulations. The MCS matching functionality has been extended to allow matches between heavy and light atoms, and the ability to return all current matches, rather than just the most recent. Temporarily disabled parallelisation in the AmberPrm parser to avoid a threading issue. Switched to using Azure Pipelines for continuous integration to enable a fully automated build, testing, and deployment pipeline. In addition, we finally have created a Sire Conda package to simplify the installation and update process.

[2018.2.0] July 2018 - Improvements to the Gromacs topology reader/writer,

addition of code to improve matching of atoms in proteins, fixing compile issues on modern Ubuntu, bugfixes for crashes in the AmberPrm reader, added in text-based searching for atoms, residues etc. from Systems, MoleculeGroups, Molecules, etc. based on boost::spirit, updated boost to latest version, bugfixes for quantomm infinite rotation bug for ions, general bugfixes.

[2018.1.1] May 2018 - Small bug fixes to allow single-atom solutes

and also to fix small issues with some parsers for BioSimSpace

[2018.1.0] March 2018 - Signficantly improved the Gromacs and Charmm

parser and fixed bugs. Can now write with both :-). Fixed compilation on Windows 7 and above. Small changes to the API of AtomProperties to make them easier to work with from Python. Added a script to automatically color code swap-based free energies. Fixed localisation problems for the PDB writer. Improved mbar analysis code. Added code to track forcefield data of a molecue. Added code to better manage processes, including redirection of standard output and error.

[2017.3.0] December 2017 - Added new PDB (PDB2), Mol2, Gro87, and CharmmPSF

parsers, as well as a GroTop parser, all part of the new MoleculeParser framework. Updated all of the swap-based methods to use this.

Removed the ViewsOfMol Python wrapper and now have the code automatically return the correct python object for the molecule (or part of molecule) that is returned from the system. This makes simple scripts easier to write.

General bugfixes and optimisations, including fixing bugs with the way that PropertyMap worked, cleaning up to/from converters from python objects to automatic Property wrappers, and fixing Process so that it can redirect to stdout and that isRunning works without the user having to call “wait” first!

[2017.2.0] September 2017 - The MoleculeParser framework has

been created to support reading and writing of molecules in lots of different formats. The first set of formats that have been completed are Amber Prmtop, Amber Rst7 and Amber Rst/Trj. The parsers work in parallel, with file formats automatically detected by the parser, e.g. system = MoleculeParser.read( “file.prm”, “file.rst” ) will automatically do the right thing.

Improved automatic compilation on Arch linux.

Fixed temperature checking and general bugfixing for mbar code.

[2017.1.0] April 20 2017 - First 2017 release. Included new

parallel MoleculeParser code for reading molecules, and moved fully over to C++-14 style coding for new code. Included AVX-512 vectorisation for Intel KNL and can now successfully compile and run using GCC 5 and GCC 6, as well as Intel 2017 compilers and Clang.

[2016.3.1] January 9 2017 - Minor patch release that fixes bugs:

1. Correctly sets MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET to 10.8 so executable works on OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion) and above

2. Fixed a parsing bug in Parameter that prevented integer or float parameters from being passed to ligandswap, waterswap etc.

3. Fixed a small bug in MultiDouble that meant it lost precision when swapping individual values

4. Fixed a parsing bug in Parameter that meant that windows path names were not interpreted correctly

5. Fixed the build scripts so that they placed bundled libraries into bundled/lib rather than bundled/lib64 (affected SUSE-based distributions)

[2016.3.0] December 22 2016 - Public release containing full LigandSwap. Uses

new optimised forcefields for energy calculations, built on top of Intel Threaded Building Blocks for parallelisation. New code is significantly faster with better scaling.

[2016.2.0] June 3 2016 - Semi-private release for the CCP-BioSim workshops. Included

the first version of LigandSwap and general bug fixes

[2016.1.0] April 29 2016 - Merge of Bristol and Edinburgh codes, moved to miniconda

and clean packaging system, including OpenMM fully, added in nautilus, somd etc., added optimised forcefields, added a proper unit testing suite.

[OLD] Updated gradient compuation in openmmfreenergst to finite differece gradients Allow the computation of reduced perturbed energies in openmmfreenergst of all computed lambda values Separated minimization and equilibration from production run. Implemented mass repartitioning for hydrogens atoms to allow for larger integration timesteps Added nautilus scripts

Google Code: August 7th 2006 - April 1st 2015

Sire was developed against the subversion repository provided by Google Code. Here is an archive of the repository.

This comprised 2775 commits, from developers @chryswoods, @jmichel80 and @nividic73.

Local Subversion: February 5th 2005 - July 25th 2006

Sire was developed against a local subversion repository. Here is a svndump of the original repository, and all of the commit history.

This comprised 831 commits from developer @chryswoods.

Sire started as ProtoMS 3, a complete C++ rewrite of ProtoMS 2, developed originally as a Fortran program by @chryswoods and @jmichel80. ProtoMS has since continued to be developed by the Essex Group and is itself now available as ProtoMS 3.4.

More detail about the history and parallel development of Sire and ProtoMS can be found here.