NCN

Banner image: The graphic depicts the global reach of nanoHUB. Red dots represent lectures and tutorials, yellow dots represent simulation users, and green lines represent collaborations documented by publications citing nanoHUB as a resource.

NCN (Network for Computational Nanotechnology) pursues its mission through the nanoHUB platform. Founded in 2002 and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) with more than $62 million to date, nanoHUB is the premier open and free platform for computational research, education, and collaboration in nanotechnology, materials science and related fields. nanoHUB is one of the first broadly successful science gateways, providing a turnkey computing environment for interdisciplinary research. The platform presents powerful research-grade simulation codes as easy-to-use apps that anyone can access in a web browser. This frictionless access allows researchers to work without barriers, educators to provide richer experiences for their students, and students to learn by rapid virtual experimentation.

nanoHUB accelerates innovation by making scientific software and associated data available and useful to research, development and education communities, removing traditional barriers of computational expertise and access to specialized hardware.

It does so by enabling simulation software developers to easily transform their products into apps that run in the cloud with a simple interface presented through a web browser, allowing domain experts, including researchers, instructors and students, to focus on applying these products to advance their fields.

Recognized by the R&D 100 award in 2020, nanoHUB has transformed how people from around the world consume simulation and data. It serves more than 23,000 annual simulation users, who perform over 1 million simulations using more than 700 online apps driven by powerful scientific software. In addition, more than 2 million worldwide visitors access nanoHUB’s 7,000 online resources, including seminars, cutting-edge courses, animations, and teaching materials.

nanoHUB has changed how simulation tools are used in education and research. nanoHUB simulations are employed in every U.S. News & World Report top 50 engineering school in the U.S. Reflecting its mission to accelerate innovation, nanoHUB also is fast-tracking the introduction of cutting-edge research into the engineering classroom. Whereas adoption of research innovations into college curricula through textbooks takes an average of 3.8 years, research tools published on nanoHUB enter classrooms at multiple institutions in weeks to months. Simulation tools deployed on nanoHUB diffuse into curricula in a median time of 174 days (5.7 months). Such adoption rates strongly indicate nanoHUB’s role in rapid instructional innovation.

The nanoHUB team focuses on deploying novel technologies to enable new ways of generating, storing, sharing and consuming simulations and data. Recent technological breakthroughs are changing how simulations and associated data are consumed. These innovations also are making simulation and data pervasive, from instant feedback via nanoHUB’s simulation cache to exploration of community-generated results, to machine learning workflows for students and researchers. Support for Jupyter notebooks in nanoHUB enables a range of products, from end-to-end, reproducible, scientific workflows to hands-on tools designed to introduce data science to students and researchers interested in engineering and physical sciences.

In summary, nanoHUB is an end-to-end platform to develop, publish and consume simulations and associated data. Software developers interact with a powerful development environment, and their tools can benefit from features like automatic uncertainty quantification. Libraries also can streamline the development of user interfaces. End users, including instructors, students and researchers, experience simulations and data in new ways via easy-to-use apps and interactive computing. nanoHUB has brought simulations and data to a broad cross section of the educational, research and development communities, and the platform continues to be developed to accelerate innovation via user-friendly apps, tools, and data.