# First GROMACS 2022 release candidate **URL:** \ **Category:** Announcements\ **Created:** [January 25, 2022, 5:55pm UTC](https://gromacs.bioexcel.eu/t/first-gromacs-2022-release-candidate/3543 "2022-01-25T17:55:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 2\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![swingberm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/898d66/32.png) [@swingberm](https://gromacs.bioexcel.eu/u/swingberm)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2022, 5:55pm UTC](https://gromacs.bioexcel.eu/t/first-gromacs-2022-release-candidate/3543/1 "2022-01-25T17:55:13Z")
Hi GROMACS users, Thanks to all of you who tested the GROMACS 2022 beta releases! Thanks to you, we improved a couple of things on the beta releases and are proud to announce the first release candidate of GROMACS 2022! We are making this available to you to get an early taste of how GROMACS 2022 will look and work, and most importantly to get feedback from you about how well things work. While we try our hardest to keep the quality of GROMACS as high as possible, we’re human, we overlook things while doing other things, and we need your many pairs of eyes to help build a tool that we can all use to do good science! We really need you to test your kinds of simulation on your hardware, both for correctness and performance. This is particularly important if you are using “interesting” hardware or compilers because we can’t test all of them! Please do not use this version for doing science you plan to publish - it needs more testing before it’s reliable enough for that. Similarly, please don’t use this version as a base for a project that bundles or forks GROMACS. What new things can you expect? (See the release notes for more details.) - Free-energy kernels are accelerated using SIMD, which makes free-energy calculations up to three times as fast when using GPUs - A new formulation of the soft-cored non-bonded interactions for free-energy calculations allows for a finer control of the alchemical transformation pathways - New transformation pull coordinate allows arbitrary mathematical transformations of one or more other pull coordinates - New fully integrated interface for performing periodic multi-scale Quantum Mechanics / Molecular Mechanics (QM/MM) simulations with CP2K quantum chemistry package. Check the installation guide, user guide, and reference manual for the details. There’s lots of other new things, and a few old things removed - please see the release notes for the complete list. All the content of GROMACS 2021.5 is present, apart from features that have been removed. Your testing helps us harden the final release. To follow progress and give further feedback, have a look at the [2022 milestone on gitlab](https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/milestones/111) and [report issues there](https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/issues). If all goes to plan, we hope to ship the final 2022 release at the beginning of February, but that relies on people joining in and helping us test! We hope you will consider making that contribution, so that we can continue to deliver high-quality free simulation software that will be useful to you. You can find the code, manual, release notes, installation instructions and test suite at the links below. Code: [https://ftp.gromacs.org/gromacs/gromacs-2022-rc1.tar.gz](https://ftp.gromacs.org/gromacs/gromacs-2022-rc1.tar.gz) Documentation: [https://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2022-rc1/index.html](https://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2022-rc1/index.html) (includes install guide, user guide, reference manual) Release Notes: [https://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2022-rc1/release-notes/index.html](https://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2022-rc1/release-notes/index.html) Test Suite: [https://ftp.gromacs.org/regressiontests/regressiontests-2022-rc1.tar.gz](https://ftp.gromacs.org/regressiontests/regressiontests-2022-rc1.tar.gz) Happy testing! Sebastian ---
**Author:** ![swingberm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/898d66/32.png) [@swingberm](https://gromacs.bioexcel.eu/u/swingberm)\ **Post date:** [January 25, 2022, 6:06pm UTC](https://gromacs.bioexcel.eu/t/first-gromacs-2022-release-candidate/3543/2 "2022-01-25T18:06:55Z")