  Fitted interatomic potentials are widely used in atomistic simulations thanks
to their ability to compute the energy and forces on atoms quickly. However,
the simulation results crucially depend on the quality of the potential being
used. Force matching is a method aimed at constructing reliable and
transferable interatomic potentials by matching the forces computed by the
potential as closely as possible, with those obtained from first principles
calculations. The potfit program is an implementation of the force-matching
method that optimizes the potential parameters using a global minimization
algorithm followed by a local minimization polish. We extended potfit in two
ways. First, we adapted the code to be compliant with the KIM Application
Programming Interface (API) standard (part of the Knowledgebase of Interatomic
Models Project). This makes it possible to use potfit to fit many KIM potential
models, not just those prebuilt into the potfit code. Second, we incorporated
the geodesic Levenberg--Marquardt (LM) minimization algorithm into potfit as a
new local minimization algorithm. The extended potfit was tested by generating
a training set using the KIM Environment-Dependent Interatomic Potential (EDIP)
model for silicon and using potfit to recover the potential parameters from
different initial guesses. The results show that EDIP is a "sloppy model" in
the sense that its predictions are insensitive to some of its parameters, which
makes fitting more difficult. We find that the geodesic LM algorithm is
particularly efficient for this case. The extended potfit code is the first
step in developing a KIM-based fitting framework for interatomic potentials for
bulk and two dimensional materials. The code is available for download via
https://www.potfit.net.
