In this talk we will discuss the growth and evolution of vhub.org an online collaboratory for volcanology. Volcanology is a complex discipline with a wide range of skillsets from field work, laboratory work, complex data gathering and analysis, mechanics, modeling and simulation all used in an integrated fashion. Interdisciplinary collaboration and the use of computational modeling and simulation has a long history in this domain. vhub.org caters to these needs and traditions and has thus built up a substantial user base in very short order. One persistent experience has been the very high levels of usage of the simulation tools and the community that rapidly builds around them. We will address these issues and related lessons learnt.

Abani K Patra obtained a Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas-Austin in 1995. After a short post-doctoral stint he joined the University at Buffalo, Mechanical and Aerospace department in 1996 and was promoted to full professor in 2004. He spent 3 years at the National Science Foundation as a program director in the Office of Cyberinfrastructure from 2007-10. He has been actively engaged in computational science research and was among the founding members of the Centers for Computational Research and the Center for Geohazards at Buffalo. He has published numerous articles on topics ranging from adaptive meshing and error analysis of finite elements, HPC and more recently large data driven methodologies. The TITAN2D toolkit, developed by Patra and co-workers is used by over 200 groups worldwide for mass flow hazard analysis and is among the more popular tools on vhub.org.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Abani K. Patra (2014), "The Vhub experience – online simulations are the water coolers...," https://help.hubzero.org/resources/1251.

  BibTex | EndNote

1. hubbub
2. hubbub2014