The Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN) was established in 2002 and has grown to be a national resource serving the research community in the emerging field of nanoscience and nanotechnology. The NCN is producing new knowledge, simulation approaches, numerical algorithms, and open-source software to help realize the promise of nanoscience. NCN researchers are carrying out simulation and modeling research in three key fundamental research themes: nanoelectronics, nanoelectromechanical systems/nanofluidics, and nanobiology and medicine. The modeling and simulation tools are available to a broader research community through a web-based cyberinfrastructure, the nanoHUB, located at www.nanoHUB.org. The capabilities of the nanoHUB have been enhanced by the NSF National Middleware Initiative (NMI). The total number of annual users of the educational and resources services on the nanoHUB have grown from under 2000 in 2002 to more than 15,000 in 2006. NanoHUB also offers courses, seminars and tutorials that are being used as educational tools in support of nanoscience and engineering curricula by 692 U.S. colleges and universities. Over the next five years, NCN plans to continue to introduce new formats for instructional delivery, which will allow access to nanoHUB services anytime, anywhere. In addition, it is expected that there will be a strong demand in industry and academe for students well versed in the simulations offered through the NCN research platforms, as well as computer science and engineering students who are engaged in the development and deployment of nanoHUB.
The Network for Computational Nanotechnology is a partnership between Purdue University, Norfolk State University (NSU), Northwestern University (NWU), Stanford University (SU), the University of Florida (UF) at Gainesville, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). Through NSF support NCN brings together a community of theorists, computational scientists, and device engineers in nanoscale science and engineering research to address the modeling and simulation challenges in understanding nanoscale phenomena and realizing integrated nanosystems. In addition, NCN has formed strategic partnerships with two Nanoscale Science and Engineering Centers (NSEC) at the University of California Berkeley (UCB) and Columbia University, the on-line MultimediaEducational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), and the Northwestern University National Center for Learning and Teaching in Nanoscale Science and Engineering. With the approval of the renewal request, faculty from the UC, Berkeley NSEC will join the core NCN team.
The vision of NCN is to provide a future in which a diverse community, united by a common culture and enabled by a shared cyberinfrastructure, uses theory, modeling, and simulation to accelerate the transformation of nanoscience to nanotechnology. The NCN team engages in research to explore nanoscale phenomena and devices through the integration of computational research, simulation, and experimentation. Based on this work, the NCN develops, modifies, and installs software tools ? tools to perform simulations on nanoscale systems -- and makes these tools available to a user community through the nanoHUB website, which is enabled by Purdue?s computing infrastructure.
The mission of the NCN is to create, deploy and operate a national resource for theory, modeling, and simulation in nanotechnology using the cyberinfrastructure to build and serve diverse communities spanning research, design, manufacturing, education and outreach. This mission is embodied in the nanoHUB and supported by research, education and outreach. The NCN?s goals and objectives are to: (a) carry out research that addresses key challenges through theory, modeling, and simulation; (b) provide professional leadership that brings communities together to identify challenges and move the field ahead; (c) develop new software tools needed for this new field; (d) lower barriers that limit the use of simulation by experimentalists and educators and equip them to be critical, effective users; (e) develop and deploy cyberinfrastructure that efficiently and robustly delivers services for simulation, education, and collaboration; (f) educate and develop a workforce to increase the number and diversity of students and faculty engaged in nanotechnology; (g) disseminate the results of its work and (h) engage the broader community through universally available web technology.
NCN is making an important impact on the integration of theoretical and experimental nanoscale research through the delivery of computationally intensive modeling and simulation tools that are being used by almost 3500 simulation users as of February 2006. In addition, NCN is producing educational materials that impact a broad range of users both in research and education. In addition to simulation tools for research and education, nanoHub offers a number of courses, seminars and tutorials that are being used as educational tools in support of nanoscale science and technology curricula on at least 692 U.S. institutions of higher education.
Established in 2002, the NCN has grown nanoHUB.org into a self feeding, vibrant online community and national resource that is the only of its kind. It has proven value to theorists, experimentalists, industry practitioners, students, and educators alike. As NCN is a virtual organization with geographically dispersed members, nanoHUB provides shared access to computational and software infrastructure that is too expensive and too difficult to replicate in every classroom or laboratory. Instead, members of the nanoHUB user community now leverage a national investment many times over rather than attempting to create their own cyber-infrastructures. The premise of NCN, an eight-partner collaboration led by Purdue University, was that computational tools were seriously underutilized in the emerging nanotechnology field and their full impact would come when they moved beyond the domain of experts and became essential tools for a broad community. The resulting internationally recognized and innovative nanoHUB for high performance computational nanotechnology research and education has created a new breed of science gateway that brings a growing body of more than 270 computational tools online and reduces the gap between experimentalists, theorists, educators, and students in an affordable, secure, and scalable framework. Also, as a result of the initial construction of nanoHUB, the HUBzero™ open source platform was created. HUBzero further leverages of the national investment in nanoHUB in that it hosts computational cycles, computational engines, and user interfaces as a central service delivered through a web browser to more than 40 scientific communities today - all powered by the same framework that underlies nanoHUB. This centralized delivery of services allows NCN to instrument and analyze usage patterns in a large scientific community in ways that have never before been possible. NCN can watch how nano science and technology grow and evolve while it happens. nanoHUB today provides a library of 2,700 seminars, tutorials, teaching materials; supports an active community of over 250,000 users worldwide; makes accessible 270 (and growing) constantly evolving simulation/modeling tools; and enables a community driven support model. Over 1032 published papers by researchers and experimentalists cite nanoHUB tools, and 12,769 users run 419,000 simulations annually. The nanoHUB includes users from all of the Top 50 US Engineering Schools, including 21% of all .edu domains and 25% of all minority serving institutions that grant degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. Such rapid community growth comes from enabling critical new connection points among experimentalists, theorists, computational experts, researchers, educators, students, and industry. Experimentalists and theorists connect as shown by many of the 1032 citations in scholarly literature. Researchers and industry partners connect as demonstrated by use of tools in the exploration of patentable intellectual property. Researchers and educators connect as shown by tools that transition from research into education (median time of 174 days after publication) through coordinated use in 1003 college courses with 19,435 students in 185 higher education institutions. The majority (95%) of participants in these connections are outside the NCN partnership and therefore fund the work themselves. nanoHUB has developed a paradigm-changing web-enabled tool development and deployment process driven by the belief that tool developers should be as comfortable deploying their tools on the web as they are using them in their own research environment. Today, this ease of deployment means nanoHUB tools are up to date with their creators’ most recent research results. Equally important, the national investment in these tools now continues to live for many years beyond the initial funding. Since nanoHUB allows scientists to directly deploy codes on the web with no rewriting, we see a rapid tool development, continued improvement, and ongoing engagement of the originating scientists. Key criteria for success have emerged as a constant drum beat of best practice for the NCN/nanoHUB team. These have become guiding requirements for serving their existing and continually growing user base: Volumes of outstanding science to share People wanting and committed to sharing A team that understands the needs of sharers A technology platform that makes sharing simple A team that finds and guides people who want to share Methods to show sharers their impact An agile yet robust operational model This project has shown that adhering to a set of guiding principles can lead to a success that exceeded expectations. What started as a way to share materials among a group of funded scientists has grown to a quarter of a million people using materials that the majority of the time have been shared by someone not funded by this project. NCN has solved a key problem: getting a large group scientists to share without being directly funded to do so. As science never rests, neither do the new requirements of scientists. The NCN’s guiding principles will direct us in serving this community in new and interesting ways in the future.
