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For a NEB calculation, is it OK to first optimize the initial and final configurations with IBRION=2 and then run the NEB-job with IBRION=3?

The problem is that trying to converge an NEB job with IBRION=2 takes a lot of cpu-hours or in most instances the computation does not converge at all.

Thanks

Is OK. It does not matter how you optimize the initial and the final configuration. Important is that they are optimized.