A Distributed Computing Method for Crystal Structure Prediction of Flexible Molecules: An Application to N-(2-Dimethyl-4,5-dinitrophenyl) Acetamide

In this paper, we describe a new distributed computing framework for crystal structure prediction that is capable of performing crystal structure searches for flexible molecules within any space group and with an arbitrary number of molecules in the asymmetric unit. The distributed computing framework includes a series of tightly integrated computer programs for generating the molecule's force field, sampling possible crystal structures using a distributed parallel genetic algorithm, locally minimizing these structures and classifying, sorting, and archiving the most relevant ones. As an example, we report the results of its application to the prediction of the crystal structure of the elusive N-(2-dimethyl-4,5-dinitrophenyl) acetamide, a molecule for which its crystal structure proved to be one of the most difficult cases in the last CSP2004 blind test for crystal structure prediction.