Spartan

Available to: Students Faculty Staff and Researchers

Platforms: Windows, Mac & Linux

 Spartan is a computational chemistry program from Wavefunction that is in widespread use in academia for instructional and research endeavors across a number of disciplines. Spartan has the best graphical user interface for the “building” of molecular structures, including complex biomolecules and weakly bound aggregates, and greatly simplifies the setup, execution, and analysis of calculations. Spartan implements a wide variety of modern computational methods, including semi-empirical, Hartree-Fock, and DFT methods, for ground and excited state species as well as transition states. All methods beyond molecular mechanics and semi-empirical utilize the latest Q-Chem computational engines.

It can utilize multiple cores (up to 16 cores but ask if you need more) for some calculations. It also incorporates extremely powerful visualization tools to represent molecular orbitals, vibrational modes, electrostatic potentials, and calculated spectra and energy levels. Spartan is also compatible with a number of other common file formats in computational chemistry (e.g. .cif, .smi, .mol, .mol2). For example, Spartan can directly download PDB files from the RCSB Protein Data Bank. Because of its widespread adoption, there are a number of text and work books available that have example calculations, some available directly from Wavefunction. The program also includes an Activities menu with Tutorials and Topics that provide further information and the built-in user manual has many other useful exercises.

Get Access 

Faculty, staff, and students can download Spartan and run the program on their computer, provided they are connected to the campus network, either directly or via the UCSD VPN service. 

Please see Spartan installation steps here.

Please see this page for tutorial and how to use Spartan.

For all Software Licensing questions please go to ITS Service Desk.