PFHub: The Phase-Field Community Hub

Scientific communities struggle with the challenge of effectively and efficiently sharing content and data. An online portal provides a valuable space for scientific communities to discuss challenges and collate scientific results. Examples of such portals include the Micromagnetic Modeling Group (μMAG) [1], the Interatomic Potentials Repository (IPR) [2, 3] and on a larger scale the NIH Genetic Sequence Database (GenBank) [4]. In this work, we present a description of a generic web portal that leverages existing online services to provide a framework that may be adopted by other small scientific communities. The first deployment of the PFHub framework supports phase-field practitioners and code developers participating in an effort to improve quality assurance for phase-field codes.

Funding statement: D.W. wishes to acknowledge the Materials Genome Initiative funding allocated to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. S.J.D wishes to acknowledge funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Award #DE-SC0008637 as part of the Center for PRedictive Integrated Structural Materials Science (PRISMS Center) at University of Michigan. P.W.V. is grateful for the financial assistance under the award 70NANB14H012 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology as part of the Center for Hierarchical Materials Design (CHiMaD).