Data Descriptor: High-throughput density-functional perturbation theory phonons for inorganic materials Guido Petretto 1 , Shyam Dwaraknath 2 , Henrique P.C. Miranda 1 , Donald Winston 2 , Matteo Giantomassi 1 , Michiel J. van Setten 1 , Xavier Gonze 1 , Kristin A. Persson 2,3 , Geoffroy Hautier 1 & Gian-Marco Rignanese 1 The knowledge of the vibrational properties of a material is of key importance to understand physical phenomena such as thermal conductivity, superconductivity, and ferroelectricity among others. However, detailed experimental phonon spectra are available only for a limited number of materials, which hinders the large-scale analysis of vibrational properties and their derived quantities. In this work, we perform ab initio calculations of the full phonon dispersion and vibrational density of states for 1521 semiconductor compounds in the harmonic approximation based on density functional perturbation theory. The data is collected along with derived dielectric and thermodynamic properties. We present the procedure used to obtain the results, the details of the provided database and a validation based on the comparison with experimental data. Design Type(s) database creation objective Measurement Type(s) physicochemical characterization Technology Type(s) quantum chemistry computational method Factor Type(s) inorganic molecular entity Sample Characteristic(s) 1 Institute of Condensed Matter and Nanoscience (IMCN), Université catholique de Louvain, B-1348 Louvain-la- neuve, Belgium. 2 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. 3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to G.P. (email: guido.petretto@uclouvain.be) or to G.H. (email: geoffroy.hautier@uclouvain.be) or to G.-M.R. (email: gian-marco.rignanese@uclouvain.be). OPEN Received: 6 December 2017 Accepted: 23 February 2018 Published: 1 May 2018 www.nature.com/scientificdata SCIENTIFIC DATA | 5:180065 | DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2018.65 1