All organizations · GSoC 2026 · Science and medicine, Data
MDAnalysis
Analysis of molecular simulations data with Python
MDAnalysis is a Python library for the analysis of computer simulations of many-body systems at the molecular scale, spanning use cases from interactions of drugs with proteins to novel materials. It is written by scientists for scientists and is used for cutting edge research in biophysics, chemistry, soft-matter physics, and materials research around the world in academia and national research labs. MDAnalysis strives to be highly interoperable and hence a growing number of projects use MDAnalysis as their foundational library or integrate it. The goal of MDAnalysis is to make it easy for users to analyze data that are produced by simulations (primarily molecular dynamics simulations) that run on some of the largest supercomputers in the world. MDAnalysis accomplishes this goal by providing a toolkit of programming building blocks that provide an abstract Python interface to the simulation data — agnostic of the specific simulation package that produced it — that lends itself to interactive data exploration and rapid prototyping but is also a robust foundational library that can form the basis for new computational tools. MDAnalysis allows one to read particle-based trajectories …
- python
- cython
- c/c++
- science
- computational-chemistry
- high-performance-computing
- molecular-simulation
- machine-learning
Project ideas
6 ideas on its 2026 ideas page; of the 6 that state a difficulty: 4 easy, 2 medium. Sizes: 3 small, 2 medium, 1 large. 9 mentors named.
- Project 1: Dashboard for tracking MD simulation progress with the new streaming interface medium easy
- Project 2: Better interfacing of Blender and MDAnalysis large medium
- Project 3: Benchmarking and performance optimization small easy
- Project 4: Lazy trajectory loading and indexing medium medium
- Project 5: Dashboard for tracking WESTPA simulation progress small easy
- Project 6: Interface for post-simulation analysis ("crawling") of WESTPA simulations small easy
Read the ideas page. Ideas are for scope reference; never copy one into a proposal.
History
In GSoC since 2020, 7 years. Projects per year: '20: 3, '21: 2, '22: 2, '23: 2, '24: 3, '25: 4, '26: 3.
On GitHub
26 repositories pushed to in the last year. Main languages: Python (17), C++ (1), CSS (1), Jupyter Notebook (1), Sass (1), Shell (1).
Links and channels
- Website: https://www.mdanalysis.org
- Ideas page: https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki/GSoC-2026-Project-Ideas
- Contributor guide: https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/wiki/Google-Summer-Of-Code
- Source code: https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis
- Mailing list: https://github.com/MDAnalysis/mdanalysis/discussions
- Chat: https://discord.com/channels/807348386012987462/
git-into-gsoc org "MDAnalysis" --shortlist
git-into-gsoc repos "MDAnalysis"
git-into-gsoc issues --org "MDAnalysis"
or ask your assistant: "Which MDAnalysis repositories merge newcomers' pull requests, and which beginner issues are still free?"
Those commands read live data: which repositories merge outside pull requests, and which beginner issues nobody has claimed. Install in two minutes.