Although the formalism that allows the calculation of alloy thermodynamic
properties from first-principles has been known for decades, its practical
implementation has so far remained a tedious process. The Alloy Theoretic
Automated Toolkit (ATAT) drastically simplifies this procedure by implementing
decision rules based on formal statistical analysis that frees the researchers
from a constant monitoring during the calculation process and automatically
"glues" together the input and the output of various codes, in order to provide
a high-level interface to the calculation of alloy thermodynamic properties
from first-principles. ATAT implements the Structure Inversion Method (SIM),
also known as the Connolly-Williams method, in combination with
semi-grand-canonical Monte Carlo simulations. In order to make this powerful
toolkit available to the wide community of researchers who could benefit from
it, this article present a concise user guide outlining the steps required to
obtain thermodynamic information from ab initio calculations.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure