FAIRsharing record for: Portable reduced-precision binary format for trajectories produced by GROMACS package.

This FAIRsharing record describes: The XTC format is a portable binary format for trajectories produced by GROMACS package. It uses the External Data Representation (xdr) routines for writing and reading data which were created for the Unix Network File System (NFS). Trajectories are written in XTC files using a reduced precision (lossy) algorithm which works multiplying the coordinates by a scaling factor (typically 1000), so converting them to pm (GROMACS standard distance unit is nm). This allows an integer rounding of the values. Several other tricks are performed, such as making use of atom proximity information: atoms close in sequence are usually close in space (e.g. water molecules). That makes XTC format the most efficient in terms of disk usage, in most cases reducing by a factor of 2 the size of any other binary trajectory format.