History, Present and Future

Like every living being or institution ASDN has its history which will be written on this page with life going on (at atomic and nano scale!).

ASDN history starts in the previous millennium. At the E-MRS (European Material Research Society) meeting in Strasbourg in 1999, Anatoli Korkin (he was at Motorola at that prehistoric time) had presented the idea of a web site and mailing list (the term "web portal" was not yet popular at that time) in fundamentals of materials design for microelectronics to Dr. Jim Greer from Tyndall Institute (at that time National Microelectronics Research Center).

Neither Anatoli nor Jim had expertise in web design. Luckily, Anatoli had a good friend, who is a guru in programming and the Internet, Dr. Jan Labanowski. Jan has his own web portal, Computational Chemistry List (CCL), and he also has a big heart for his friends, desperate to enlist his skills, knowledge and wisdom. Jan used the CLL scripts as a prototype to design the framework of ASDN, which he, Anatoli and Jim (and his students) populated by initial information.

However, the life of ASDN on the Internet (and the major traffic to the domain) came not from its mailing list or data bases (links) but from the Nano and Giga Forum, series of the Nano & Giga Challenges conferences with the initial focus in microelectronics (NGCM2002 and NGCM2004) which has been expended further toward photonics (NGC2007) and renewable energy (NGC2009).

The new 3,5 years long page in ASDN history started in the summer 2007 when the leading Russian nanotechnology tool maker, NT-MDT signed an agreement with Nano & Giga Solutions for the development of ASDN.NET into an educational web portal for atomic structure and fundamentals of nanotechnology. Generous support from NT-MDT helped to develop series of tutorial pages, including very popular ones, such as Chemistry of Love and Silicates.

From the beginning of 2016 ASDN becomes an internet gateway of the Center for Computational Design of Materials and Devices (CDMD) at the National Research Tomsk State University in collaboration with international education and research community. Activities of the Center cover three main areas: fundamental and applications oriented research, development and implementation of educational programs, and development of new computational tools for academic and industrial applications. We continue with development of tutorial web pages as well.