The software was designed to be a library that made it easier to write other programs, rather than a program in and of itself. As such, it was never meant to be directly visible or directly used by researchers. Instead, researchers use software that has been enabled by sire, and that invisibly uses sire "under the hood". This design philosophy was an inspiration for its name; sire being a single-syllable short word that means "to parent", i.e. sire would be the "parent" of other programs. Software developed using sire includes waterswap , quantomm , nautilus , somd , FESetup and most notably BioSimSpace . Commercially, sire is embedded in Flare produced by Cresset and within the drug discovery pipelines used by Exscientia.ai .