Steve Clark |
Steve Clark helps thousands of students, faculty and researchers explore nanotechnology. From intuitive, interactive simulations for undergraduates to complex, computation-intensive simulations for advanced researchers, Clark gets simulation applications running on the nanoHUB gateway and works to interface them with grid computing resources.
Clark is a member of the Scientific Gateways team at Purdue University's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing. He joined the team just over a year ago, returning to his alma mater after a 20-year career at a small software company.
"The job posting talked about making applications available to people for research and learning, and I thought that would be interesting," said Clark. "It was also a chance to return to Purdue, where I received my degrees. It's been pretty amazing—when I joined there were six people in the group, and now it's up to 27, and that doesn't include everyone working on the nanoHUB."
Clark's new position was a bit of a culture shock. After two decades of working with a handful of people in a small company, he was thrust into a growing nanoHUB group and the international world of grid computing.
"The whole scale is different with nanoHUB and the grid," noted Clark. "At the software company, there had been between two and five people over 20 years. If you needed to send something to someone, you just ftp'd it across the room."
The Purdue team leads the operation and development of the nanoHUB, a gateway to nanotechnology educational materials and simulation tools. All simulations run through the gateway are currently processed on a computer cluster located at Purdue university, but the team plans to move some of the more computationally intensive simulations to TeraGrid or Open Science Grid resources. Clark is testing a few selected programs, such as the quantum chemistry application GAMESS, on the two grid infrastructures. Grids and science gateways aren't all that Clark has been learning about, however; he's also been brushing up on his nanotechnology.
"Most of the things I learned a quarter of a century ago as a graduate student in chemical engineering don't apply here," added Clark. "The nanoHUB isn't just simulation; there's a huge amount of background information as well. Every once in a while I'll take a moment and check out some of the educational material. It's interesting to figure out what exactly the scientists are talking about when they send me an application, and why the 40,000 lines of text a program might output is important."
Clark's work is funded by the National Science Foundation through the TeraGrid Science
Gateways program and the nanoHUB middleware project.
—Katie Yurkewicz
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