Practical Considerations in Cloud Utilization for the Science Gateway nanoHUB.org

nanoHUB.org is arguably the largest online nanotechnology user facility in the world. Just between July 2010 and June 2011 it served 177,823 users. 10,477 users ran 393,648 simulation jobs on a variety of computational resources ranging from HUBzero-based virtual execution hosts for rapid, interactive runs as well as grid-based resources for computationally-intense runs. We believe that as such our users experience a fully operational scientific “cloud”-based infrastructure even though it is not using “standard” computational cloud infrastructures such as EC2. In this paper we explore the use of standard computational cloud-based resources to determine whether they can deliver satisfactory outcomes for our users without requiring high personnel costs for configuration. In a science gateway environment, the assignment of jobs to the appropriate computational resource is not trivial. Resource availability, wait time, time to completion, and likelihood of job success must all be considered in order to transparently deliver an acceptable level of service to our users. In this paper, we present preliminary results examining the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing standard computational cloud resources as one potential venue for nanoHUB computational runs. In summary we find that cloud resources performed competitively with other grid resources in terms of wait time, CPU usage, and success in a multiple job submission strategy

nanoHUB.org Serving Over 120,000 Users Worldwide: It\u27s First Cyber-Environment Assessment

nanoHUB.org is a major engineering cyber- environment that annually supports over 120,000 users with online simulation and more. Over 8,500 nanoscale engineering and science researchers, educators, and learners run over 340,000 simulations with over 170 simulation tools annually. These tools allows them to transparently and interactively leverage a range of computational resources ranging from small jobs to massive simulations that execute on the Teragrid or the Open Science Grid (OSG). In this paper, we provide some background into the working of nanoHUB as a virtual organization and a cyber- environment and describe its growth pattern focusing on the mechanisms that allow the formation of a community around it

Social Networks of Researchers and Educators on nanoHUB.org

The science gateway nanoHUB.org is the world’s largest nanotechnology user facility, serving 167,196 users in 2010 with over 2,300 resources including 189 simulation programs. Surveys of nanoHUB users and automated usage analysis find widespread simulation use in formal classroom education, thereby connecting recent research more rapidly and closely to education. Analysis of 719 citations in the scientific literature by over 1,300 authors to nanoHUB.org resources documents use of simulation programs by new research collaborations, by researchers outside of the community originating the program, and by experimentalists. The publication and author networks reveal research collaborations and capacity building through knowledge transfer. Analysis of secondary citations documents the quality of the conducted research with an h-index of 30 after just 10 years of operation. Our analysis proves with quantitative metrics that impactful research can be conducted by an ever growing research community. We argue that HUBzero technology and the user- focused design and operation of nanoHUB.org are success criteria that can be transferred to other science gateways