The Materials Project: Accelerating Materials Design Through Theory-Driven Data and Tools

The Materials Project (MP) is a community resource for theory-based data, web-based materials analysis tools, and software for performing and analyzing calculations. The MP database includes a variety of computed properties such as crystal structure, energy, electronic band structure, and elastic tensors for tens of thousands of inorganic compounds. At the time of writing, over 40,000 users have registered for the MP database. These users interact with this data either through the MP web site (https://www.materialsproject.org) or through a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API). MP also develops or contributes to several open-source software libraries to help set up, automate, analyze, and extract insight from calculation results. Furthermore, MP is developing tools to help researchers share their data (both computational and experimental) through its platform. The ultimate goal of these efforts is to accelerate materials design and education by providing new data and software tools to the research community. In this chapter, we review the history, theoretical methods, impact (including user-led research studies), and future goals for the Materials Project.