Getting Started

What's VOLT?

VOLT is a collaborative platform for materials science teams working with LAMMPS simulations. It brings together the parts of the workflow that usually end up scattered across desktops, scripts, shared drives, notebooks, and cluster terminals: trajectory processing, analysis, notebooks, LaTeX writing, containers, team coordination, and infrastructure.

If you mostly think in terms of dumps, timesteps, defect analysis, notebooks, and papers, VOLT is designed to feel like a workspace built around that reality rather than a generic file manager with a 3D viewer attached.

Who it is for

• Research groups running molecular dynamics workloads on laptops, workstations, or lab servers.
• Students and postdocs who need to move from raw trajectories to figures, tables, and papers without stitching together five different tools.
• Teams that want shared infrastructure without handing their simulation data over to a centralized cloud service.

What you can do inside VOLT

Instead of treating simulation work as a series of disconnected steps, VOLT keeps the whole loop in one place. You can upload a trajectory, wait for it to be parsed and preprocessed, open it in the 3D viewer, run an analysis plugin, inspect the resulting listings or 3D overlays, then jump into a notebook or a LaTeX document without changing context.

Along the way, you can also:

• connect one or more team clusters,
• import data from remote machines over SSH,
• run custom Docker containers,
• automate workflows with Volt AI or the SDKs,
• and collaborate through chat, whiteboards, notifications, and shared team roles.

What VOLT is not

VOLT is not trying to replace every specialist tool in the field. It does not position itself as a desktop-first alternative to OVITO or VMD. Instead, it wraps visualization and analysis into a larger system that also handles storage, orchestration, automation, collaboration, and publishing.

That difference matters. In VOLT, a trajectory is not just something you open locally. It is part of a team workspace with cluster-backed processing, reusable analysis results, notebooks, access control, AI tooling, and a paper-writing flow living next to it.

Key ideas that make the platform click

How the system is arranged

The important thing to know early is that VOLT is not built around centralizing your simulation files on the product server. Your team's cluster is where the real work happens. The platform server coordinates users, teams, auth, APIs, and real-time updates, but the daemon on your cluster handles processing, file access, notebook runtime, plugin execution, previews, and storage.

That design is why the platform can scale from a personal machine to a dedicated server setup without changing the mental model. When you need more compute or storage, you add or upgrade clusters rather than migrating your workflow into a different product tier.

Create your VoltID

Go to app.voltcloud.dev/auth/sign-in to create or access your account.

You can sign in with Google, GitHub, or Microsoft. If you prefer email, VOLT also supports a direct email flow that either signs you in or guides you through account creation depending on whether the address already exists.

Your first team

After signing in, the first thing VOLT asks for is a team. That is because almost everything in the platform is team-scoped: trajectories, clusters, analyses, chats, notebooks, roles, and AI integrations all belong to a team.

You can rename the team later, create additional teams for other projects, and invite collaborators once the workspace is ready.

Connect your first cluster

A team is only half of the setup. To actually process trajectories and run analyses, you need at least one connected cluster.

A cluster can be:

• your own laptop,
• a workstation in the lab,
• or a dedicated Linux server.

After choosing the cluster type, assign it a name and copy the install command VOLT gives you.

Run that command on the target machine. Under the hood, the installation bootstraps the daemon and the local services the team needs, then enrolls the machine with your workspace.

Once the daemon starts sending heartbeats, the cluster moves from waiting to connected and the rest of the platform comes alive.

What happens next

Once your team and cluster are ready, the normal path looks like this:

1. upload a trajectory,
2. let VOLT parse and preprocess it,
3. open the viewer and inspect frames,
4. run one or more analysis plugins,
5. explore the results as listings, charts, or 3D artifacts,
6. move into notebooks, LaTeX, or AI-assisted workflows as needed.

If you want a desktop window instead of the browser, you can also install the client app.

Where to go from here