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). Soon after the CRADA ended, a final F77 version of the code, LAMMPS 99, was released. As development of LAMMPS continued at Sandia, the memory management in the code 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, including features from other parallel molecular dynamics codes written at Sandia, namely ParaDyn, Warp, and GranFlow. ParaDyn is a parallel implementation of the popular serial DYNAMO code developed by Stephen Foiles and Murray Daw for their embedded atom method (EAM) metal potentials. ParaDyn uses atom- and force-decomposition algorithms to run in parallel. Warp is also a parallel implementation of the EAM potentials designed for large problems, with boundary conditions specific to shearing solids in varying geometries. GranFlow is a granular materials code with potentials and boundary conditions peculiar to granular systems. All of these codes (except ParaDyn) use spatial-decomposition techniques for their parallelism.

For further information please go to: lammps.sandia.gov/doc/Section_history.html