Supporting Infrastructure for Nanotechnology and Beyond

nanoHUB.org, which provides cyberinfrastructure for the nanotechnology community, has seen its number of active users double almost every year since its inception.  In 2010, nanoHUB.org served more than 350,000 visitors from 172 countries.  Of these, a core audience of 167,000 spent at least 15 minutes on the site viewing seminars, downloading teaching materials, or interacting with simulation/modeling tools submitted by a worldwide community.

The origins of nanoHUB.org were in 2002, when the National Science Foundation formed the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), and charged it with a mission to create a national resource for theory, modeling, and simulation in nanotechnology, as well as to form a nanotechnology community by connecting users in research, education, design, and manufacturing.  In the course of this work, the NCN created nanoHUB.org.

Some people compare nanoHUB.org to the highly successful Open Courseware Initiative from MIT.  But nanoHUB.org is more than just a repository for course materials.  It is a place where researchers and educators can meet and accomplish real work.  nanoHUB.org offers groups for private collaboration, software development projects in its nanoFORGE area, an active question/answer forum, and many other services designed to connect researchers and build a community.

Most importantly, nanoHUB.org connects users to the simulation/modeling tools they need for research and education.  Users can access more than 220 interactive, graphical tools, and not only launch simulations, but also visualize and analyze the results, all via a standard Web browser.  Simulation jobs can be dispatched immediately upon the click of a mouse, with no wait for allocations or computing time. These jobs can be offloaded onto national grid resources, bringing the resources of TeraGrid, the Open Science Grid, and Purdue’s own DiaGrid to each user’s desktop.  HUBzero’s unique middleware hides much of the complexity of grid computing, handling authentication, authorization, file transfer, and visualization.  This approach helps bring the tools into the classroom and into experimental labs, within reach of students and other researchers who are not computational experts.

nanoHUB.org tools, seminars, and other resources are being cited in academic journals and are treated as a new form of electronic publication.  To date, there are more than 700 citations of these new resources in academic literature.