Editoral

Welcome to the latest edition of the CCP1 newsletter.

The last year has seen a number of special conferences to acknowledge the contributions of a number of leading CCP1 members. In chronological order meetings have honoured Vic Saunders, Nicholas Handy, Ian Hillier and David Hirst. For those who haven't managed to attend these meetings we are pleased to include short articles describing these events, please see the Recent conferences section.

The next CCP1 Study weekend entitled "Chemical Reactivity of Large Systems" will be held at Daresbury in March 2005. Please check on the CCP1 web site for more information.

Many CCP1 members will be aware of the National Service for Computational Chemistry Software (NSCCS), an EPSRC funded service providing both computational resources and a wide range of computational chemistry and materials software. Sarah Wilsey, manager of the service has provided a short article. CCP1 members are encouraged to publicise the service in their departments, particularly to those new to computational methods who will benefit most from the pre-installed software base and training on offer.

Finally, we include an number reports detailing work carried out by the Daresbury staff and also present some highlights of research carried out within the community's flagship project and the community itself.

If you have suggestions for content of future newsletters, or would like to contribute an article, please contact me by email

                          Dr Huub van Dam
                          CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory.

• Molecular and Solid State Quantum Chemistry
  A meeting in honour of Vic Saunders
• Molecular Quantum Mechanics: The No Nonsense Path to Progress
  An international conference in honour of Professor Nicholas C. Handy
• Towards Accurate Calculation of Biomolecular Recognition and Reactivity
  A conference in honour of Professor Ian Hillier
• A Computational Approach to Chemistry
  A symposium to honour the career of David Hirst

• The CCP1 GUI, a free and open source graphical interface for quantum chemistry packages.
• e-CCP1: Exploring e-Science technologies for quantum chemistry.
• GAMESS-UK - an update on functionality of the forthcoming release 7.0.

If you would like to contribute a short summary of your work to be included here, please send to h.j.j.vandam@dl.ac.uk.

• Car-Parrinello flagship project update
  Michiel Sprik, Clare College, Cambridge
• Nuclear Permutation Symmetry and the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation
  Brian Sutcliffe, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium