Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Other Nanotechnology Publications Birck Nanotechnology Center October 2008 nanoHUB.org: Advancing Education and Research in Nanotechnology Gerhard Klimeck School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University, [email protected] Michael McLennan Purdue University - Main Campus Sean B. Brophy Purdue University - Main Campus George B. Adams III Purdue University - Main Campus Mark S. Lundstrom Purdue University - Main Campus Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/nanodocs Klimeck, Gerhard; McLennan, Michael; Brophy, Sean B.; Adams, George B. III; and Lundstrom, Mark S., "nanoHUB.org: Advancing Education and Research in Nanotechnology" (2008). Other Nanotechnology Publications. Paper 80. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/nanodocs/80 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. H IGH- P E R F O R M A N C E C O M P U T I N G E DUCATION nanoHUB.org: Advancing Education and Research in Nanotechnology Through the Network for Computational Nanotechnology Web site, nanoHUB.org, tens of thousands of users from 172 countries collaborate, share resources, and solve real nanotechnology problems. The authors share their experiences in developing and using the site’s unique cyberinfrastructure. n 2002, the US National Science Foun- a history of sharing simulation tools, such as dation established a university network, the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit called the Network for Computational Emphasis (SPICE).1 The goal was to encourage Nanotechnology (NCN), to support the the development of many tools, tutorials, pod- INational Nanotechnology Initiative. This initia- casts, animations, publications, lecture notes, tive provides a multi-agency framework in support and homework assignments, which we refer to of US government investments in fundamental collectively as “resources.” To achieve this, we nanoscale phenomena research and the transla- needed an infrastructure that would make it easy tion of new understanding to new technology. for a worldwide community of content contribu- NCN aimed to further these goals in three ways: tors to upload and share their resources, receive bringing computational tools online, making the feedback, and make improvements. All of this had tools easy to use, and educating users about the to happen in a self-serve fashion, with very little tools and nanoscience. intervention by NCN staff, so that it could scale Along the way, NCN has created a unique to serve a very large community. cyberinfrastructure to support its Web site, nanoHUB.org hosts nearly 1,000 resources, in- nanoHUB.org, where researchers, educators, and cluding 87 simulation tools (see Figure 1). Many professionals have been collaborating, sharing re- of our resources are published under a Creative sources, and solving nanotechnology problems. Commons 2.5 license (http://creativecommons. In 2007, nanoHUB.org served more than 56,000 org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/), letting others create users from 172 countries. In this article, we share derivative works. NCN staff review contributed our experiences in developing and using this cy- content for appropriateness, completeness, and berinfrastructure, particularly in an educational basic functioning, and we encourage users to context. rate and comment on all resources. Roughly 27 Developing nanoHUB.org 1521-9615/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE NCN chose to focus initially on nanoelectron- COPUBLISHED BY THE IEEE CS AND THE AIP ics, nanoelectromechanical systems, and devices Gerhard Klimeck, Michael McLennan, Sean B. Brophy, for biology and medicine for three reasons: these George B. Adams III, and Mark S. Lundstrom areas are developing rapidly, no curricula have been fully established, and nanoelectronics has Purdue University COMPUTING IN SCIENCE & ENGINEERING THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN PEER-REVIEWED. 17 Online simulation… …and more (c) (b) (d) (a) Figure 1. nanoHUB.org provides online simulation and more to a global following. (a) More than 56,000 users in 2007 accessed its resources, including (b) simulations and (c) Flash-based tutorials. Many tutorials are also available as (d) iTunes podcasts, which have attracted more than 6,800 users. percent of the content has received ratings (using at all Top 50 US engineering schools2 and more a five-star scale), and 46 percent of the ratings than 14 percent of all .edu domains. (See www. have associated comments. Content with many nanohub.org/usage for additional usage details, favorable ratings tends to bubble up in search re- updated monthly.) sults, whereas content with poor ratings is harder to find. To date, NCN has pursued tool quality Cyberinfrastructure by engaging selected research groups for tool de- nanoHUB.org simulation tools aren’t the batch- velopment. NCN member sites have encouraged mode services common on the Web; rather, the majority of other content, such as research they’re intuitive, interactive graphical tools that seminars, tutorials, short courses, homework ex- make it easy for users to learn and explore. Users ercises, and animations. can launch simulations from their Web browser The nanoHUB.org user community grew simply by clicking the “Simulate” button and can from 1,000 users in 2002 to more than 56,000 in change any parameter, launch another simulation, 2007. Some 5,800 registered users logged in and and quickly compare results. About one-third of ran more than 240,000 simulation jobs in 2007. the nanoHUB.org tools deliver results in less than We identify unregistered users by IP address and 10 seconds, about one-half in less than one min- count them only if they aren’t a Web-crawling ute. Computationally demanding simulation jobs robot and if they download a resource or spend dispatch to grid computing resources, including more than 15 minutes browsing the site. Roughly the NSF TeraGrid (www.teragrid.org), Open Sci- 85 percent of our registered users and 91 per- ence Grid (www.opensciencegrid.org), and virtual cent of unregistered users are affiliated with an clusters powered by Violin software.3 Intensive educational institution. nanoHUB.org has users volume rendering and flow-visualization tasks dis- 18 COMPUTING IN SCIENCE & ENGINEERING patch seamlessly to a specialized rendering cluster.4 over its associated control. The GUI can include nanoHUB.org middleware hides grid computing’s embedded notes in HTML format, with links to complexity, handling authentication, authoriza- tutorials and documentation. Rappture recogniz- tion, file transfer, and visualization, and letting the es various output types and automatically invokes user focus on conducting experiments and learn- the appropriate visualization engine. In the past ing new concepts. Irrespective of the computation three years, more than 200 developers have used time, users can set up and analyze their numeri- Rappture on more than 190 projects. Typical proj- cal experiments’ results interactively in a friendly ects have required a few days of programmer time GUI without installing any software. nanoHUB. to create the Rappture interface that readied a raw org can achieve such ease of use for numerous tools simulation code for nanoHUB.org deployment. because of its unique cyberinfrastructure. Rappture also provides a consistent and acces- nanoHUB.org is built on the open source sible presentation, which is extremely important LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) plat- in an educational setting. Instructors interested form5 and the Joomla (www.joomla.org) content in constructing a coherent sequence of learning management system. Launching a tool session in- experiences for students need a common interface vokes a Joomla component that we developed. The for all the tools. For example, the design project component then communicates with our middle- for a course might require the synthesis of results ware to launch a tool session on a cluster of avail- from several simulation tools. With a consistent able machines and emits a Web page containing a interface, learners will apply their intellectual en- virtual network computing applet6 that connects ergy to investigating their questions rather than back to the live tool session. To users, it appears to learning new interfaces. that a simple Java applet is running in their Web browser—and indeed it is—but nanoHUB.org Role in Education is serving the tool (which could be a community Early on, NCN identified users at academic insti- code consisting of a few hundred thousand lines tutions—both educators and researchers—as our of source code developed in tens of person years) target audience and set out to meet their needs. and the computing cycles from a much more so- Many educators and students don’t have adminis- phisticated platform, which can scale to handle trator privileges to install software on their com- very large jobs (such as memory-intensive jobs puters. For tools to be used in the classroom, they that require large amounts of RAM or highly par- must be available on all platforms, including Win- allel jobs that might require many CPUs). dows, Mac OS X, and Linux, without user-based To drastically reduce the programmer hours installation. They must be easy to use and time ef- needed to create friendly GUIs to a wide vari- ficient. They should have integrated visualization ety of powerful simulation codes, NCN created capabilities so that, with minimal effort, students an open source toolkit called Rappture