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We report on the background, current status, and current lines of development of the octopus project. This program materializes the main equations of density-functional theory in the ground state, and of timedependent density-functional theory for dynamical effects. The focus is nowadays placed on the optical (i.e. electronic) linear response properties of nanostructures and biomolecules, and on the non-linear response to high-intensity fields of finite systems, with particular attention to the coupled ionic-electronic motion (i.e. photo-chemical processes). In addition, we are currently extending the code to the treatment of periodic systems (both to one-dimensional chains, two-dimensional slabs, or fully periodic solids), magnetic properties (ground state properties and excitations), and to the field of quantum-mechanical transport or "molecular electronics." In this communication, we concentrate on the development of the methodology: we review the essential numerical schemes used in the code, and report on the most recent implementations, with special attention to the introduction of adaptive coordinates, to the extension of our real-space technique to tackle periodic systems, and on large-scale parallelization. More information on the code, as well as the code itself, can be found at http://www.tddft.org/programs/octopus/.

ABINIT is a package whose main program allows one to find the total energy, charge density, electronic structure and many other properties of systems made of electrons and nuclei, (molecules and periodic solids) within Density Functional Theory (DFT), Many-Body Perturbation Theory (GW approximation and Bethe-Salpeter equation) and Dynmical Mean Field Theory (DMFT). ABINIT also allows to optimize the geometry according to the DFT forces and stresses, to perform molecular dynamics simulations using these forces, and to generate dynamical matrices, Born effective charges and dielectric tensors. The present paper aims to describe the new capabilities of ABINIT that have been developed since 2009. It covers both physical and technical developments inside the ABINIT code, as well as developments provided within the ABINIT package. The developments are described with relevant references, input variables, tests and tutorials.

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Real-space grids are a powerful alternative for the simulation of electronic systems. One of the main advantages of the approach is the flexibility and simplicity of working directly in real space where the different fields are discretized on a grid, combined with competitive numerical performance and great potential for parallelization. These properties constitute a great advantage at the time of implementing and testing new physical models. Based on our experience with the Octopus code, in this article we discuss how the real-space approach has allowed for the recent development of new ideas for the simulation of electronic systems. Among these applications are approaches to calculate response properties, modeling of photoemission, optimal control of quantum systems, simulation of plasmonic systems, and the exact solution of the Schrödinger equation for low-dimensionality systems.