We
present an implementation for the use of Cholesky decomposition
(CD) of two-electron integrals within the spin-free Dirac–Coulomb
(SFDC) scheme that enables to perform high-accuracy coupled-cluster
(CC) calculations at costs almost comparable to those of their nonrelativistic
counterparts. While for nonrelativistic CC calculations, atomic-orbital
(AO)-based algorithms, due to their significantly reduced disk-space
requirements, are the key to efficient large-scale computations, such
algorithms are less advantageous in the SFDC case due to their increased
computational cost in that case. Here, molecular-orbital (MO)-based
algorithms exploiting the CD of the two-electron integrals allow us
to reduce disk-space requirements and lead to computational cost in
the CC step that is more or less the same as in the nonrelativistic
case. The only remaining overhead in a CD-SFDC-CC calculation is due
to the need to compute additional two-electron integrals, the somewhat
higher cost of the Hartree–Fock calculation in the SFDC case,
and additional cost in the transformation of the Cholesky vectors
from the AO to the MO representation. However, these additional costs
typically amount to less than 5–15% of the total wall time
and are thus acceptable. We illustrate the efficiency of our CD scheme
for SFDC-CC calculations on a series of illustrative calculations
for the X(CO)4 molecules with X = Ni, Pd, Pt.