LAMMPS development began in the mid 1990s under a cooperative research & development agreement (CRADA) between two DOE labs (Sandia and LLNL) and 3 companies (Cray, Bristol Myers Squibb, and Dupont). The goal was to develop a large-scale parallel classical MD code; the coding effort was led by Steve Plimpton at Sandia.
After the CRADA ended, a final F77 version, LAMMPS 99, was released. As development of LAMMPS continued at Sandia, its memory management was converted to F90; a final F90 version was released as LAMMPS 2001.
The current LAMMPS is a rewrite in C++ and was first publicly released in 2004. It includes many new features beyond those in LAMMPS 99 or 2001. It also includes features from older parallel MD codes written at Sandia, namely ParaDyn, Warp, and GranFlow (see below).
As of late 2006 we are merging new capabilities into LAMMPS that were developed by Aidan Thompson at Sandia for his MD code GRASP, which has a parallel framework similar to LAMMPS. Most notably, these include many-body potentials - Stillinger-Weber, Tersoff, REAXX - and the associated charge-equilibration routines needed for REAXX.
ParaDyn is a parallel implementation of the popular serial DYNAMO code. DYNAMO was developed by Stephen Foiles and Murray Daw to model metals with their embedded atom method (EAM) metal potentials. ParaDyn uses atom- and force-decomposition algorithms to run in parallel. Warp is a spatial-decomposition MD code with EAM potentials, with boundary conditions specific to shearing solids in varying geometries. GranFlow is a granular materials code, written with Leo Silbert and Gary Grest, that includes potentials and boundary conditions specific to granular systems.
All versions of LAMMPS are available for download from the download page. ParaDyn is available from Steve Plimpton's download page.
A brief listing of features in the older codes is given here:
LAMMPS 2001
LAMMPS 99
ParaDyn