
Figure 1: Computational methods evaluated by their reliability, required researcher effort, and scaling of the computational effort with system size. The coloration of the left semicircle represents the complexity and expertise necessary for the researcher to perform the technique, where a blue tone signifies low effort and a red tone signifies high effort. The coloration of the right semicircle characterizes the reliability of the method on a similar coloration scale. Finally, the size of the Circle demonstrates how the computational effort scales with system size. Methods evaluated include a variety of density functional theory (DFT) techniques, including local density approximation (LDA) and generalized gradient approximation (GGA), empirical tight-binding, and many-bodied GW approaches. Reprinted from Butler, et al. [1].
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