Support

GROMACS support

To facilitate the communication between users and developers of GROMACS we have created a forum  and two mailing lists that you can subscribe to. 

• check the GROMACS Documentation, which has a lot of detail and key information within,
• search in the GROMACS forum,
• search in the Mailing List Archieve
• search the internet using a search engine such as Google,
• check the GROMACS GitLab as the error encountered may be a bug. Before suggesting the existence of a bug on the Forum, please ensure error is reproducible and check that issue is present in the most recent version, and before submitting a issue for GROMACS GitLab, have set of files that developers can use to reproduce the error.

Do not email a developer or list/forum subscriber personally unless your question pertains directly to their published work.  

GROMACS forum

GROMACS forum has 2 categories:

- GROMACS user forum discussion point for installation and usage of GROMACS software. For questions related to development please use the gmx-developers mailing list . An account is required to post a new topic or to answer to a current topic. To create a account go to the here and use sign up bottom. 

- GROMACS announcements. Everybody can see, only staff can post.

When posting to the forum, it is important to remember that those on the emailing list are just fellow users of the software. They are not paid to answer your question. With that in mind, some things that will assist in improving the chance that you get some helpful response to your problem are:

1. Use an informative title for your topic and use of one topic for one question.
2. Provide as much detailed information as possible on the problem.

• cite your GROMACS version number and specify if the code has been modified
• describe your simulation system (e.g. protein name, protein size, solvent, ions, box type, box size, force field),
• describe your simulation preparation before the problem arose,
• copy and paste your input command lines,
• consider including your .mdp file or the relevant portion of your .top or .log file,
• consider uploading a relevant image or PDF
• inspect all your output files, stderr and stdout for information,
• copy and paste any error message (look in both the .log file and stderr),
• say why you thought the output was not what you expected,

3. When you've solved the problem, please consider posting a reply to the forum detailing what was wrong, your solution and how it worked. Not only might this help people in the future, but it might teach you more about the problem and the solution. 
4. use good etiquette, avoiding ALL CAPS, bad spelling and punctuation, txtspk, perso. abbrs, etc.,

A very good article for anyone who may be asking or answering questions on an emailing lists to read is How To Ask Questions The Smart Way, but do not pester Eric S. Raymond and Rick Moen (the authors of that page) with questions about GROMACS or anything else. A recently published article has also appeared on this topic, with particular focus on getting help on scientific forums.

Mailing Lists

The two mailing lists (see the menu items on the left) have slightly different purposes, and you might not be interested in subscribing to all of them:

• gmx-announce has extremely low traffic and will only contain information from the GROMACS crew. Users can not post to this list, but we strongly recommend everyone to subscribe to it, so you get notice about new versions and severe bugs, events and job postings.
• gmx-developers is the place for developers. Post all your questions, suggestions and code impromevents here!

If you don't like to have your mailbox flooded with messages you can choose a digest alternative and only get one larger mail per day. Please don't include the entire digest if you reply.