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, also shortened to nanotech, is the use of matter on an atomic, molecular, and supramolecular scale for industrial purposes. The earliest, widespread description of nanotechnology referred to the particular technological goal ...

. Funded by the United States

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

(NSF), it is a product of the Network for Computational Nanotechnology (NCN). NCN supports research efforts in

nanoelectronics Nanoelectronics refers to the use of nanotechnology in electronic components. The term covers a diverse set of devices and materials, with the common characteristic that they are so small that inter-atomic interactions and quantum mechanical p ...

;

nanomaterials * Nanomaterials describe, in principle, materials of which a single unit is sized (in at least one dimension) between 1 and 100 nm (the usual definition of nanoscale). Nanomaterials research takes a materials science-based approach to n ...

;

nanoelectromechanical system Nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) are a class of devices integrating electrical and mechanical functionality on the nanoscale. NEMS form the next logical miniaturization step from so-called microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS devices. NEMS ...

s (NEMS);

nanofluidics Nanofluidics is the study of the behavior, manipulation, and control of fluids that are confined to structures of nanometer (typically 1–100 nm) characteristic dimensions (1 nm = 10−9 m). Fluids confined in these structures exhibit p ...

;

nanomedicine Nanomedicine is the medical application of nanotechnology. Nanomedicine ranges from the medical applications of nanomaterials and biological devices, to nanoelectronic biosensors, and even possible future applications of molecular nanotech ...

nanobiology Nanobiotechnology, bionanotechnology, and nanobiology are terms that refer to the intersection of nanotechnology and biology. Given that the subject is one that has only emerged very recently, bionanotechnology and nanobiotechnology serve as bla ...

; and

nanophotonics Nanophotonics or nano-optics is the study of the behavior of light on the nanometer scale, and of the interaction of nanometer-scale objects with light. It is a branch of optics, optical engineering, electrical engineering, and nanotechnolog ...

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 land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded in 1869 after Lafayette businessman John Purdue donated land and ...

, the

University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...

, the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

, the

Molecular Foundry The Molecular Foundry is a nanoscience user facility located at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, and is one of five Nanoscale Science Research Centers sponsored by the United States Department of Energy. Ove ...

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, the United States Department of Energy. Located in ...

Norfolk State University Norfolk State University (NSU) is a public historically black university in Norfolk, Virginia. It is a member of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and Virginia High-Tech Partnership. History The institution was founded on September 18, 193 ...

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

, and the

University of Texas at El Paso The University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) is a public research university in El Paso, Texas. It is a member of the University of Texas System. UTEP is the second-largest university in the United States to have a majority Mexican American stud ...

, NCN now operates entirely at Purdue. The US

(NSF) provided grants of approximately $14 million from 2002 through 2010, with

principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often u ...

Mark S. Lundstrom. Continuing US NSF grants have been awarded since 2007 with

Gerhard Klimeck Gerhard Klimeck is a German-American scientist and author in the field of nanotechnology. He is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. As the director of nanoHUB, h ...

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 displayi ...

of NCN is nanoHUB.org and is an instance of a

HUBzero HUBzero is an open source software platform for building websites that support scientific activities. History HUBzero was created by researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the NSF-sponsored Network for Computational Nanotechnology. ...

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

, as well as the

TeraGrid TeraGrid was an e-Science grid computing infrastructure combining resources at eleven partner sites. The project started in 2001 and operated from 2004 through 2011. The TeraGrid integrated high-performance computers, data resources and tools, a ...

and

Open Science Grid The Open Science Grid Consortium is an organization that administers a worldwide grid of technological resources called the Open Science Grid, which facilitates distributed computing for scientific research. Founded in 2004, the consortium is co ...

. 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 linear partial differential equation that governs the wave function of a quantum-mechanical system. It is a key result in quantum mechanics, and its discovery was a significant landmark in the development of th ...

. ;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 In physics, a drift velocity is the average velocity attained by charged particles, such as electrons, in a material due to an electric field. In general, an electron in a conductor will propagate randomly at the Fermi velocity, resulting in an a ...

, electron

average energy In physics, a partition function describes the statistical properties of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. Partition functions are functions of the thermodynamic state variables, such as the temperature and volume. Most of the aggregat ...

and

electron mobility In solid-state physics, the electron mobility characterises how quickly an electron can move through a metal or semiconductor when pulled by an electric field. There is an analogous quantity for holes, called hole mobility. The term carrier mobil ...

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 In geometry and crystallography, a Bravais lattice, named after , is an infinite array of discrete points generated by a set of discrete translation operations described in three dimensional space by : \mathbf = n_1 \mathbf_1 + n_2 \mathbf_2 + n_ ...

, planes and

Miller indices Miller indices form a notation system in crystallography for lattice planes in crystal (Bravais) lattices. In particular, a family of lattice planes of a given (direct) Bravais lattice is determined by three integers ''h'', ''k'', and ''� ...

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 In solid-state physics, the electronic band structure (or simply band structure) of a solid describes the range of energy levels that electrons may have within it, as well as the ranges of energy that they may not have (called ''band gaps'' or '' ...

of bulk semiconductors,

thin films A thin film is a layer of material ranging from fractions of a nanometer ( monolayer) to several micrometers in thickness. The controlled synthesis of materials as thin films (a process referred to as deposition) is a fundamental step in many ...

, and

nanowires A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of a nanometre (10−9 metres). More generally, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a thickness or diameter constrained to tens of nanometers or less ...

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 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 dynamic "evolution" of th ...

to simulate materials at the atomic scale. ;DFT calculations with Quantum ESPRESSO: uses

density functional theory Density-functional theory (DFT) is a computational quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure (or nuclear structure) (principally the ground state) of many-body ...

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 The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, ins ...

(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 Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

, 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 yourlogin@sftp.nanohub.org 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 con ...

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 hardware that accepts requests via HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initia ...

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, multiuser 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, ...

systems, Xen virtual machines, and a form of virtualization based on

OpenVZ OpenVZ (Open Virtuozzo) is an operating-system-level virtualization technology for Linux. It allows a physical server to run multiple isolated operating system instances, called containers, virtual private servers (VPSs), or virtual environmen ...

. 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.

References

External links

* {{official, https://nanohub.org/ Cyberinfrastructure

History

Resources

Simulation tools

Infrastructure

Rappture Toolkit

Jupyter notebooks

Workspaces

Middleware

Usage

nanoHUB-U

See also

References

Further reading

External links