GOVERNMENT

A key team member in a White House effort to cut in half the time and cost of bringing new materials from discovery in the laboratory to deployment in the marketplace and the director of the Disaster and Failure Studies Program at National Institute of Standards and Technology are among the featured speakers set for HUBbub 2013, the annual conference for HUBzero, a ready-made, open source cyberinfrastructure for research and education.

 

Meredith Drosback is the Minerals, Metals, and Materials Society Fellow at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She works on the Materials Genome Initiative, a multi-agency program launched by President Obama in 2011 to drive accelerated advancement of new materials. Hubs such as nanoHUB.org, manufacturingHUB.org and other HUBzero sites bring together online communities of users eager to address these challenges.

 

Eric Letvin is director of the Disaster and Failure Studies Program at NIST’s Engineering Laboratory. He is responsible for creating and maintaining a national data repository of hazard events, both natural, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, and human made, including terrorism. He has participated in numerous post-disaster studies including the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and Hurricane Katrina.

 

Letvin will discuss NIST’s use of HUBzero to create the national Disaster and Failure Events Data Repository, including data from the devastating Chile earthquake in 2010 and Joplin, Missouri, tornado in 2011.

 

Ann Christine Catlin, a senior research scientist at Purdue University, will describe a new database toolkit developed for the HUBzero platform and used by NIST to support its initiative.

 

NIST’s disaster database, the Materials Genome Initiative and a U.S. EPA environmental modeling hub are all examples of a growing user base for cyberinfrastructure like HUBzero beyond the halls of academia, says Michael McLennan, chief architect of HUBzero at Purdue, where the platform is developed.

 

“There are now more than 50 hubs based on HUBzero serving many areas of science, engineering and other fields, from nanotechnology, cancer treatment and advanced manufacturing to earthquake engineering, pharmaceutical and biofuels development and the bonds between human and companion animals,” McLennan says.

 

The two-day HUBbub 2013 conference is for researchers, practitioners, educators and IT professionals and takes place September 5-6, 2013, at the Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre Hotel, 31 W Ohio St., Indianapolis.

 

Originally developed to power nanoHUB.org, HUBzero is a Web-based platform for building collaborations in scientific and other kinds of research, as well as educational projects. A major HUBzero feature is its ability to deploy computational research codes, and visualize and analyze results, all through a Web browser. Built-in social networking creates communities in almost any field or subject matter and facilitates communication and collaboration, distribution of research results, training and education. Moreover, the platform has a growing set of data management and interactive database capabilities and integrated Pegasus workflow capability to make tapping high-performance and cloud computing resources simpler.

 

The latest open source version of HUBzero, to be released at the HUBbub 2013 conference, will include new Pinterest-style information sharing, a new course delivery system for online education, and the new mechanism for more easily publishing interactive databases.

 

HUBbub 2013 includes talks and hands-on sessions for hub developers and users who want to learn more about the platform, and for those curious about hubs or interested in deploying the open source HUBzero to establish one.

 

Among others who are scheduled to speak:

 

* Andy Burnett, CEO of Knowinnovation Inc., which focuses on mechanisms to accelerate scientific innovation, including Astrobiologyfuture.org, a HUBzero-based site developed for NASA.

 

* Chris Dagdigian, co-founder of the BioTeam consulting firm, which focuses on high-performance computing, cyberinfrastructure (including hubs) and discovery-oriented life science research.

 

* David Anderson, research scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the BOINC project, which develops middleware for volunteer computing.

 

HUBbub 2013 is sponsored by the HUBzero Foundation, whose members are Purdue University, Indiana University, The Pennsylvania State University, and Knowinnovation Inc.

 

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