The Hub Concept for Scientific Collaboration
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Abstract
The software that powers the popular nanoHUB.org site has been extracted into package called the HUBzero Platform for Scientific Collaboration. The Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, the research computing group at Purdue University, has been using this package for two years to create a variety of hubs for other disciplines, including NEES.org (the George E. Brown, Jr., Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation), pharmaHUB.org (pharmaceutical engineering), cceHUB.org (cancer care engineering), C3Bio.org (biofuels research), and GlobalHUB.org (global engineering education), to name a few. Each new hub has the same capabilities as nanoHUB.org, but has its own content, its own tools, and its own community of scientific users.
The HUBzero platform was released as Open Source at the HUBbub 2010 Workshop in Indianapolis, Indiana, on April 13, 2010. Other projects outside Purdue have downloaded the code from the hubzero.org site and started their own hub. To date, there are 13 such hubs running outside Purdue based on the open source release, including hubs in Russia, India, and Qatar.
The Rosen Center also offers a hosting service to Purdue faculty and other non-profit organizations interested in having IT support for designing and maintaining a HUBzero site. This whitepaper describes the capabilities of HUBzero and outlines the process of setting up a new hub using our hosted service.
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