Lynn K. Zentner

nanoHUB.org: cloud-based services for nanoscale modeling, simulation, and education

Abstract nanoHUB.org is arguably one of the most successful science gateways funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is the cyberinfrastructure that supports the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN), currently serving over 240,000 users annually in 172 countries worldwide. It features a range of resources including seminars, online courses, short courses, full-fledged tool-powered curricula, and over 260 online simulations and modeling tools. nanoHUB functions as a scientific cloud where users cannot only design and run their tools but also provide a worldwide audience access to these tools with no installation or minimal infrastructural requirements on the users’ part.

Social Networks of Researchers and Educators on nanoHUB.org

The science gateway nanoHUB.org is the worlds largest nanotechnology user facility, serving 167, 196 users in 2010 with over 2,300 resources including 189 simulation programs. Surveys of nanoHUB users and automated usage analysis find widespread simulation use in formal classroom education, thereby connecting recent research more rapidly and closely to education. Analysis of 719 citations in the scientific literature by over 1,300 authors to nanoHUB.org resources documents use of simulation programs by new research collaborations, by researchers outside of the community originating the program, and by experimentalists. The publication and author networks reveal research collaborations and capacity building through knowledge transfer. Analysis of secondary citations documents the quality of the conducted research with an h-index of 30 after just 10 years of operation. Our analysis proves with quantitative metrics that impactful research can be conducted by an ever growing research community. We argue that HUBzeroTM technology and the user-focused design and operation of nanoHUB.org are keys to success that can be transferred to other science gateways.

NanoHUB.org - the ABACUS tool suite as a framework for semiconductor education courses

More than 170,000 users annually in 172 countries use nanoHUB.org for web-based access to simulation programs as well as a vast selection of related content, including online presentations and lectures, teaching materials, curated topic pages, podcasts, and downloads. With over 2500 resources including over 200 simulation tools, the science gateway nanoHUB.org is the worlds largest nanotechnology user facility. Over 10,000 research and educational users utilized nanoHUB simulation programs to run over 364,000 simulations last year. In academic year 2009–10, nanoHUB.org content was used in 150 undergraduate and graduate courses at 97 institutions. From the time of its inception through the beginning of 2011, nanoHUB.org has been cited 719 times in the literature. A detailed analysis of these citations indicates a dual use of nanoHUB content in both education and research, with educational tool usage by researchers and research tools migrating into the classroom. By leveraging existing capabilities, we have developed the Assembly of Basic Applications for Coordinated Understanding of Semiconductors (ABACUS) suite of simulation tools and supporting educational content that can serve as an aid to an introductory semiconductor course. ABACUS serves as a one-stop-shop for students and teachers to enable rapid access to the critical elements needed in the introduction to semiconductor devices.

Automated grid probe system to improve end-to-end grid reliability for a science gateway

In 2010, the science gateway nanoHUB.org, the worlds largest nanotechnology user facility, hosted 9,809 simulation users who performed 372,404 simulation runs. Many of these jobs are compute-intensive runs that benefit from submission to clusters at Purdue, TeraGrid, and Open Science Grid (OSG). Most of the nanoHUB users are not computational experts but end-users who expect complete and uninterrupted service. Within the ecology of grid computing resources, we need to manage the grid submissions of these users transparently with the highest possible degree of user satisfaction. In order to best utilize grid computing resources, we have developed a grid probe protocol to test the job submission system from end to end. Beginning in January 2009, we have collected a total of 1.2 million probe results from job submissions to TeraGrid, OSG, Purdue, and nanoHUB compute clusters. We then utilized these results to intelligently submit jobs to various grid sites using a model for probability of success based in part on probe test history. In this paper we present details of our grid probe model, results from the grid probe runs, and a discussion of data from production runs over the same time period. These results have allowed us to begin assessing our utilization of grid resources while providing our users with satisfactory outcomes.

Network for Computational Nanotechnology - a strategic plan for global knowledge transfer in research and education

The Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) manages the science gateway nanoHUB.org, recognized as the worlds largest nanotechnology user facility, with over 2800 research and teaching resources in use by over 180,000 users annually. Resources consist of 220 simulation tools and nearly 2600 other content items ranging from podcasts of lectures to first time user guides for simulation tools to complete sets of university course materials. Simulation tools developed for research have been found to be used in the classroom and simple classroom tools are being used by researchers. With a global community spread across 172 countries, nanoHUB.org facilitates fast knowledge transfer across countries, disciplines, and communities. NCN follows a carefully planned strategy to lower barriers to this knowledge transfer and the growth and success of the site validates this strategy.

Creating impact in the digital space: digital practice dependency in communities of digital scientific innovations

Modern science has become collaborative and digital. The Internet has supported the emergence of scientific digital platforms that globally connect programmers and users of novel digital scientific products such as scientific interactive software tools. These digital scientific innovations complement traditional text-based products like journal publications. This article is focused on the scientific impact of a platform’s programming community that produces these digital scientific innovations. The article’s main theoretical argument is that beyond an individual’s contribution efforts to these innovations, a new social structure affects his scientific recognition through citations of his tools in text-based publications. Taking a practice theory lens, we introduce the concept of a digital practice structure that emerges from the digital innovation work practice, performed by programmers who jointly work on a tool. This digital practice creates dependence forces among the community members in an analogy to Newton’s gravity concept. Our model represents such dependencies in a spatial autocorrelative model. We empirically estimate this model using data of the programming community of nanoHUB in which 477 nanotechnology tool programmers have contributed more than 715 million lines of code. Our results show that a programmer’s contributions to digital innovations may have positive effects, while the digital practice structure creates negative dependency effects. Colloquially speaking, being surrounded by star performers can be harmful. Our findings suggest that modeling scientific impact needs to account for a scientist’s contribution to programming communities that produce digital scientific innovations and the digital work structures in which these contributions are embedded.

nanoHUB: Experiences and insights on care and feeding of a successful, engaged science gateway community.

Established in 2002, nanoHUB.org continues to attract a large community of users for computational tools and learning materials related to nanotechnology [1, 2]. Over the last 12 months, nanoHUB has engaged over 1.4 million visitors and 13,000 simulation users with over 5,000 items of content, making it a premier example of an established science gateway. The nanoHUB team tracks references to nanoHUB in the scientific literature and have found nearly 1,600 vetted citations to nanoHUB, with over 19,000 secondary citations to the primary papers, supporting the concept that nanoHUB enables quality research. nanoHUB is also used extensively for both informal and formal education [3,4], with automatic algorithms detecting use in 1,501 classrooms reaching nearly 30,000 students. During 14 years of operation, the nanoHUB team has had an opportunity to study the behaviors of its user base, evaluate mechanisms for success, and learn when and how to make adjustments to better serve the community and stakeholders. We have developed a set of success criteria for a science gateway such as nanoHUB, for attracting and growing an active community of users. Outstanding science content is necessary and that content must continue to expand or the gateway and community will grow stagnant. A large challenge is to incentivize a community to not only use the site, but more importantly, to contribute [5,6]. There is often a recruitment and conversion process that involves, first, attracting users, giving them reason to stay, use, and share increasingly complex content, and then go on to become content authors themselves. This process requires a good understanding of the user community and its needs as well as an active outreach program, led by a user-oriented content steward with a technical background sufficient to understand the work and needs of the community. A reliable infrastructure is a critical key to maintaining an active, participatory community. Using underlying HUBzero® technology, nanoHUB is able to leverage infrastructure developments from across a wide variety of hubs, and by utilizing platform support from the HUBzero team, access development and operational expertise from a team of 25 professionals that one scientific project would be hard-pressed to support on its own. nanoHUB has found that open assessment and presentation of stats and impact metrics not only inform development and outreach activities but also incentivize users and provide transparency to the scientific community at large.

In the Flow: Evolving from Utility Based Social Medium to Community Peer

In a broad sense, a social medium is an online interaction space. Most commonly known online interaction spaces are infrastructures that allow members to interact around one or more nexuses of interaction using one or more modes of interaction. Success or failure of an online interaction space depends on how effectively the nexuses and modes meet the needs of the intended community of users. nanoHUB.org is described as an online interaction space that was designed largely by considering how members of the intended community could satisfy the “needs of the one” through chosen nexuses and modes. Based on satisfying several acute needs of individuals, the nanoHUB online interaction space grew into a large community that is beginning to behave more as a social unit than as a group of individuals. The primary nexus of interaction, a simulation tool, was chosen as an active rather than passive nexus (i.e. consuming from the nexus creates new information in the process). The active nexus more easily facilitates the design of features where the social medium itself can consume from the nexus and produce novel information useful to its community of users. In effect, it can become more than an infrastructural platform. It can become a member of its own community.

nanoHUB-U: A science gateway ventures into structured online education

nanoHUB.org is arguably the largest online nanotechnology user facility in the world. From an initial user base of about 1,000 users, nanoHUB has grown to support over 250,000 users annually. nanoHUB supports users in 172 countries with materials for research and education, along with a wide variety of simulation tools covering many nano-related areas. Preliminary assessments of user behavior patterns have shown that nanoHUBs open access approach enables published resources to be integrated directly into classrooms. However, there is an increasing demand for pedagogically sound, workforce-ready, advanced courses that allow users to gain depth in topical areas related to nanotechnology. This paper explores an initial case study where an evolving cyber environment, based on the powerful HUBzero platform, begins to offer structured online courses to its massive audience through an experiment known as nanoHUB-U. This paper describes the impetus for this new offering and discusses how new and cutting-edge content formats are being combined with online simulations in significant ways. Further, it explores in-depth the outcomes related to one of the most popular courses offered to date.