nanoHUB.org is a science and engineering gateway comprising community-contributed resources and geared toward education, professional networking, and interactive simulation tools for
nanotechnology
Nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter with at least one dimension sized from 1 to 100 nanometers (nm). At this scale, commonly known as the nanoscale, surface area and quantum mechanical effects become important in describing propertie ...
. Funded by the United States
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
(NSF), it is a product of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN).
NCN supports research efforts in
nanoelectronics;
nanomaterials;
nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS);
nanofluidics;
nanomedicine,
nanobiology; and
nanophotonics.
History
The Network for Computational Nanotechnology was established in 2002 to create a resource for nanoscience and nanotechnology via online services for research, education, and professional collaboration.
Initially a multi-university initiative of eight member institutions including
Purdue University
Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...
, the
University of California at Berkeley, the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...
, the
Molecular Foundry at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
Norfolk State University,
Northwestern University
Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
, and the
University of Texas at El Paso, NCN now operates entirely at Purdue.
The US
National Science Foundation
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...
(NSF) provided grants of approximately $14 million from 2002 through 2010, with
principal investigator Mark S. Lundstrom.
Continuing US NSF grants have been awarded since 2007 with
principal investigator Gerhard Klimeck and co-principal investigator
Alejandro Strachan, with total funding of over $20 million.
Resources
The
Web portal
A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
of NCN is nanoHUB.org and is an instance of a
HUBzero hub. It offers simulation tools, course materials, lectures, seminars, tutorials, user groups, and online meetings.
Interactive simulation tools are accessible from web browsers and run via a distributed computing network at
Purdue University
Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...
, as well as the
TeraGrid and
Open Science Grid. These resources are provided by hundreds of member contributors in the nanoscience community.
Main resource types:
* Interactive simulation tools for nanotechnology and related fields
* Course curricula for educators
* News and events for nanotechnology
* Lectures, podcasts and learning materials in multiple formats
* Online seminars
* Online workshops
* User groups
* Online group meeting rooms
* Virtual Linux workspaces that facilitate tool development within an in-browser Linux machine
Simulation tools
The nanoHUB provides in-browser simulation tools geared toward nanotechnology, electrical engineering, materials science, chemistry, and semiconductor education. nanoHUB simulations are available to users as both stand-alone tools and part of structured teaching and learning curricula comprising numerous tools. Users can develop and contribute their own tools for live deployment.
Examples of tools include:
;SCHRED: calculates envelope wavefunctions and the corresponding bound-state energies in a typical
Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (MOS) or Semiconductor-Oxide-Semiconductor (SOS) structure and a typical SOI structure by solving self-consistently the one-dimensional (1D) Poisson equation and the 1D
Schrödinger equation
The Schrödinger equation is a partial differential equation that governs the wave function of a non-relativistic quantum-mechanical system. Its discovery was a significant landmark in the development of quantum mechanics. It is named after E ...
.
;Quantum Dot Lab: computes the
eigenstates of a particle in a box of various shapes including domes and pyramids.
;Bulk Monte Carlo Tool: calculates the bulk values of the electron
drift velocity, electron
average energy and
electron mobility
In solid-state physics, the electron mobility characterizes how quickly an electron can move through a metal or semiconductor when pushed or pulled by an electric field. There is an analogous quantity for Electron hole, holes, called hole mobilit ...
for electric fields applied in arbitrary crystallographic direction in both column 4 (Si and Ge) and III-V (GaAs, SiC and GaN) materials.
;Crystal Viewer: helps in visualizing various types of
Bravais lattices, planes and
Miller indices needed for many material, electronics and chemistry courses. Also large bulk systems for different materials (Silicon, InAs, GaAs, diamond, graphene,
Buckyball) can be viewed using this tool.
;Band Structure Lab: computes and visualizes the
band structures of bulk semiconductors,
thin films, and
nanowires for various materials, growth orientations, and strain conditions. Physical parameters such as the bandgap and
effective mass can also be obtained from the computed band structures.
;nano-Materials Simulation Toolkit: uses
molecular dynamics
Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the Motion (physics), physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamics ( ...
to simulate materials at the atomic scale.
;DFT calculations with Quantum ESPRESSO: uses
density functional theory to simulate the electronic structure of materials.
Infrastructure
Rappture Toolkit
The Rappture (Rapid APPlication infrastrucTURE) toolkit provides the basic infrastructure for the development of a large class of scientific applications, allowing scientists to focus on their core algorithm. It does so in a language-neutral fashion, so one may access Rappture in a variety of programming environments, including C/C++, Fortran and Python. To use Rappture, a developer describes all of the inputs and outputs for the simulator, and Rappture generates a
Graphical User Interface
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...
(GUI) for the tool automatically.
Jupyter notebooks
To complement the existing Rappture GUI tools within nanoHUB, the more recent browser based
Jupyter notebooks are also available on nanoHUB, since 2017. Jupyter in nanoHUB offer new possibilities using the existing scientific software, and most notably all Rappture tools, within nanoHUB with the notebooks of interspersed code (e.g.
Python, text, and multimedia.
Workspaces
A workspace is an in-browser Linux desktop that provides access to NCN's Rappture toolkit, along with computational resources available on the NCN, Open Science Grid, and TeraGrid networks. One can use these resources to conduct research, or as a development area for new simulation tools. One may upload code, compile it, test it, and debug it. Once code is tested and working properly in a workspace, it can be deployed as a live tool on nanoHUB.
A user can use normal Linux tools to transfer data into and out of a workspace. For example, sftp
[email protected] will establish a connection with a nanoHUB file share. Users can also use built-in
WebDAV
WebDAV (Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is a set of extensions to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which allows user agents to collaboratively author contents ''directly'' in an HTTP web server by providing facilities for conc ...
support on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux operating systems to access their nanoHUB files on a local desktop.
Middleware
The
web server
A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...
uses a daemon to dynamically relay incoming
VNC connections to the execution host on which an application session is running. Instead of using the port router to set up a separate channel by which a file import or export operation is conducted, it uses VNC to trigger an action on the browser which relays a file transfer through the main nanoHUB web server. The primary advantage of consolidating these capabilities into the web server is that it limits the entry point to the nanoHUB to one address: www.nanohub.org. This simplifies the security model as well as reduces on the number of independent security certificates to manage.
One disadvantage of consolidating most communication through the web server is the lack of scalability when too much data is transferred by individual users. In order to avoid a network traffic jam, the web server can be replicated and clustered into one name by means of DNS round-robin selection.
The backend execution hosts that support Maxwell can operate with conventional
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
systems,
Xen virtual machines, and a form of virtualization based on
OpenVZ. For each system, a VNC server is pre-started for every session. When OpenVZ is used, that VNC server is started inside of a virtual container. Processes running in that container cannot see other processes on the physical system, see the CPU load imposed by other users, dominate the resources of the physical machine, or make outbound network connections. By selectively overriding the restrictions imposed by OpenVZ, it is possible to synthesize a fully private environment for each application session that the user can use remotely.
Usage
The majority of users come from academic institutions using nanoHUB as part of their research and educational activities. Users also come from national labs and private industry.
As a scientific resource, nanoHUB was cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature, peaking in 2009.
Approximately sixty percent of the citations stem from authors not affiliated with the NCN. More than 200 of the citations refer to nanotechnology research, with more than 150 of them citing concrete resource usage. Twenty citations elaborate on nanoHUB use in education and more than 30 refer to nanoHUB as an example of national cyberinfrastructure.
nanoHUB-U
The nanoHUB-U
online course initiative was developed to enable students to study a subject in a five-week framework roughly equivalent to a 1-credit class. No credit is given – quizzes and exams are simple and are intended to be aids to learning rather than rigorous tests for acquired skills. In the spirit of a research university, nanoHUB-U courses aim to bring new advances and understanding from research into the curriculum; in addition, simulation (often from nanoHUB) are heavily included in the courses. Every effort is made to present courses in a way that is accessible to beginning graduate students with a variety of different backgrounds with a minimum number of prerequisites. The ideal nanoHUB-U course is accessible to any students with an undergraduate degree in engineering or the physical sciences. Courses include nanoelectronics, nanoscale materials, and nanoscale characterization. nanoHUB-U courses are now a part of
edX.
See also
*
Materials informatics
*
Integrated computational materials engineering
*
Multiscale modeling
References
Further reading
EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 42, no. 6 - nanoHUB: Community & CollaborationPublications related to HUBzeroFederal Resources for Educational ExcellenceIBM.com: nanoHUB Does Remote Computing Right *
External links
* {{official, https://nanohub.org/
Cyberinfrastructure
Nanotechnology institutions