A Case Study of the Application of COTS Components in a Molecular Dynamics Software

Abstract—Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components are widely used in many software industries and also in scientific computing. This paper first considers the definition of the term COTS and then tries to explore how it typically manifests itself in a software used for Molecular dynamical calculations. Some details regarding a popular software used for such calculations, viz., GROMACS are furnished. Since this is a freely downloadable program and a non-commercial one, it is better to consider this as an example of Scientific Off –The- Shelf (SOTS) components, a newly coined acronym.

Index Terms—COTS, GROMACS software, molecular dynamics, SOTS.

N. Gnanasankaran is with the Department of Master of Computer Applications, KLN College of Information Technology, Pottapalayam, Tamil Nadu, India (email: sankarn.iisc@gmail.com).
S. Natarajan is with the School of Physics, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India.
K. Alagarsamy is with the Computer Centre, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India.
K. Iyakutti is with the Department of Physics, Noorul Islam University, Kumaracoil, Tamil Nadu, India.

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Cite: N. Gnanasankaran, S. Natarajan, K. Alagarsamy, and K. Iyakutti, "A Case Study of the Application of COTS Components in a Molecular Dynamics Software," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 1, no. 2, pp. 141-143, 2013.