nanoHUB.org serving over 120,000 users worldwide: It's first cyber-environment assessment

nanoHUB.org is a major engineering cyber-environment that annually supports over 120,000 users with online simulation and more. Over 8,500 nanoscale engineering and science researchers, educators, and learners run over 340,000 simulations with over 170 simulation tools annually. These tools allows them to transparently and interactively leverage a range of computational resources ranging from small jobs to massive simulations that execute on the Teragrid or the Open Science Grid (OSG). In this paper, we provide some background into the working of nanoHUB as a virtual organization and a cyber-environment and describe its growth pattern focusing on the mechanisms that allow the formation of a community around it.