NEESgrid: A Distributed Virtual Laboratory for Advanced Earthquake Experimentation and Simulation

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This award to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is for a six-month, scoping study to define detailed user requirements, hardware and software technologies, and needed support infrastructure for the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) system for the NEES collaboratory. The NEES collaboratory is part of the NEES Major Research Equipment project, which will be developed during 2000-2004 and operated from 2004-2014. The collaboratory will connect, through a high performance network, distributed major earthquake engineering research equipment such as shake tables, centrifuges, tsunami/wave tanks, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and field experimentation and monitoring installations. The collaboratory will also provide a curated repository for experimental data, enable teleobservation and teleoperation participation in earthquake engineering experiments, and provide capabilities for computation and distributed simulation. The scoping study will identify the needs of the earthquake engineering research community as well as the advanced networking, data management, and computation technology that will be available in 2004 and beyond for the NEES collaboratory. Based on this information, this project will develop a system architecture, a detailed system design, and an implementation plan for the NEES collaboratory. Project participants include the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Argonne National Laboratory, University of Michigan, and University of Southern California.