Purdue Set For HUBbub Conference
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowPurdue University has unveiled details of the HUBbub 2013 conference. The two-day event focuses on illustrating and expanding the capabilities of HUBzero, the school's research and education cyberinfrastructure.
August 28, 2013
News Release
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 cyberinfrastructure for research and education developed at Purdue by ITaP.
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 related to 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 Chile earthquake in 2010 and the Joplin tornado in 2011.
Ann Christine Catlin, a senior research scientist for ITaP Research Computing (RCAC), will describe a new database toolkit within the HUBzero platform 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 ITaP's Michael McLennan, chief architect of HUBzero at Purdue.
“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 Thursday and Friday, September 5-6, 2013, at the Sheraton Indianapolis City Centre Hotel, 31 W Ohio St., Indianapolis.
HUBbub 2013 will include 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. The conference includes talks in the morning and hands-on tutorials in the afternoon with use cases showing how others employ the hub technology.
Originally developed to power nanoHUB.org, HUBzero is a Web-based platform for building scientific and other kinds of research, as well as educational, collaborations. 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.
Featured speakers at HUBbub 2013 from academia, government and business will talk about challenges facing their communities and solutions based on the HUBzero platform. 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, a consulting firm combining 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 and the Foundation members are: Purdue, Indiana University, The Pennsylvania State University, and Knowinnovation Inc.
The HUBzero Foundation — open to any academic institution, non-profit organization, or corporation — is designed to expand the platform’s already considerable capabilities and offers a number of benefits to members. Foundation members get access to the latest HUBzero features and bug fixes before they’re available in the open source release and have the inside track on all new development. The membership fee scales based on an organization’s budget and funds are used to support outreach events, such as HUBbub.
Source: Purdue University