Welcome to PolyHub EVO!

PolyHub is an Engineering Virtual Organization with the goal to initiate and catalyze fundamental research of the physical phenomena associated with polymer dynamics on a truly global scale. This organization, operating under a grant from the National Science Foundation, connects leading researchers on three continents for the advancement of research in the field of polymer dynamics, in all its forms (theory, experiment, and simulation) and at all relevant length scales (Angstroms to centimeters) and time scales (picoseconds to minutes). PolyHub began as a collaborative effort between the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Stanford University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology, in association with international partners from the University of Patras in Greece, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland, and the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany. PolyHub consists of many features that enable close collaborations between polymer researchers worldwide, such as extensive data warehousing for shared usage, common computational facilities and support, visualization platforms, simulation code bridging, and Wiki-enabled documentation of the latest reprints and preprints related to the mission of PolyHub. If you have questions or wish to participate and contribute to the PolyHub organization, please contact the Program Director, Brian Edwards (bje@utk.edu), or Chief Technology Officer, Gerald Ragghianti (geri@utk.edu), for more information.

PolyHub provides a centralized distribution, storage, computational, and server platform for all aspects of polymer physics and dynamics research. Data storage, of experimental or computational origin, is stored for use by the entire PolyHub community. Many Terabytes of storage are dedicated to this project, so that all data of relevance can be saved in sufficient detail to allow other affiliates to use it without having to repeat an experiment or simulation. PolyHub acts as a server and central distribution site for graphical, imaging, and animation software, creating a common suite among affiliated institutions for presenting simulation and experimental data.

Another key feature of PolyHub is the distributed computing capability, patterned after the successful implementation of the Open Science Grid. Rather than waste idle computational cycles at participating affiliate institutions, research groups can join the distributed computing grid, whereby programs submitted to the centralized PolyHub server are distributed to network machines when these are not being used by the host institutions. This allows shared computational usage for maximizing simulation capacity, without placing any additional burden on the host institution. Furthermore, PolyHub users have access not only to shared computational facilities at participating PolyHub institutions, but also over the entire global Open Science Grid network. Perhaps the most exciting feature of PolyHub is the potential to use the common computational platform provided to combine codes and algorithms to produce global collaborations which combine complementary methodologies into faster, more rigorous, more detailed, and more illuminating simulations of polymer physics and dynamics.

PolyHub is built on the Twiki collaboration platform. All PolyHub collaborators are encouraged to take full advantage of the powerful features of this platform to facilitate use of this resource.