nanoHUB.org

McLennan, Michael. (2010) nanoHUB.org. In: Nanoinformatics 2010, November 3 - 5, 2010, Arlington, VA. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In 2002, the NSF established the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) with a mission to connect users in research, education, design, and manufacturing by creating a national resource for theory, modeling, and simulation in nanotechnology. Users access this cyberinfrastructure from the nanoHUB.org web site. In 2009, nanoHUB.org served 274,000 visitors from 172 countries worldwide. Of these, a core audience of more than 100,000 users watched seminars, downloaded podcasts and other educational materials, and accessed more than 160 nanotechnology simulation tools. While accessing the tools, users launched a total of 369,000 simulation runs via their web browser and spent 7,286 days interacting with tools and plotting results. nanoHUB.org supports both education and research. In 2009, 116 graduate and undergraduate classes at 97 institutions made use of nanoHUB.org in class, 50 for the first time that year. To date, 575 papers in the scholarly literature cite various resources on nanoHUB.org. In turn, these 575 papers are cited on average 6.1 times, to a total of 3,521 citations, and nanoHUB.org has an h index of 27. Experimental data is reported alongside simulation results in 142/469 (30%) of the nano research papers that cite nanoHUB.org, indicating a clear impact on experimental research. Simulation activity on nanoHUB.org is powered by a unique middleware that helps connect the dots between a scientific code and an end user. Code developers create a project area on nanoHUB.org, upload their code, build it, test it, and publish the final result as a tool that others can run. End users find the tool, press a button to launch an interactive session, and then interact with a graphical user interface (GUI) to set input parameters, run jobs, and visualize results. The GUI is generated automatically from an XML description of program inputs and outputs by a toolkit called Rappture, the Rapid Application Infrastructure. Rappture has an application programming interface (API) that can handle codes written in C/C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Java, Python, among other languages, and has been used by hundreds of developers to create a few hundred tools published on nanoHUB.org and other hubs. Other activities on nanoHUB.org are also fueled by community contributions. In addition to the tools, users upload their own seminars, tutorials, homework assignments, and other resources onto the site. They rate various contributions on a scale of 1-5 stars and provide review comments. They add suggestions for improvement on various wish lists for the tools and for the site as a whole. They collaborate in private groups, editing wiki pages and sharing documents. They pose questions and provide answers in a community forum. These capabilities empower the community to work together online, publishing results and providing insights in an entirely new way.

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