A Grid to simulate earthquakesUrbana Champaign 05 September 2000 The US National Science Foundat awarded the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) $300,000 to lead a national partnership of research centers in planning and designing the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) grid, a national virtual laboratory for earthquake engineering.
Joining NCSA in leading the development of the NEESgrid are the mathematics and computer science division at the Department of Energy's Argonne National
Laboratory; the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the University of Michigan; the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of
Southern California (USC); the Mid-America Earthquake Center at UIUC; and UIUC and USC's civil engineering departments. Argonne's material science division and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research will also contribute to the
NEESgrid efforts.
The NEESgrid will be built on proven, existing grid technologies like the Globus
toolkit developed by Argonne and USC, and it will allow researchers to seamlessly share experimental equipment, computational resources, and data. It will serve three communities within earthquake engineering: structural engineering, concerning the impact of seismic activity on buildings, bridges, and the like; tsunami research, concerning the formation and effects of tsunamis; and
geotechnical engineering, concerning the interactions of seismic activity with subsurface soil and rock and with foundations and infrastructures.
One of the features of the NEESgrid will be its power as a "teleobservation"
and "teleoperation" tool. In other words, researchers will be able to control
experimental tools - a seismograph, camera, or even a robot - at remote
sites from their desktop workstation. They will also have real-time, remote
access to the information generated by those tools. This information could
include instrument data, as well as video and audio feeds.
The NEESgrid's capabilities will also extend to those of a more traditional
computational grid, linking supercomputers and high-end computing clusters,
storage facilities, software repositories, and databases. The NEESgrid will
exploit supercomputing and storage resources at NCSA, as well as other existing
pieces of grid infrastructure at other team sites. This modular setup will
provide a highly extensible and flexible computing environment. It will also
allow for the rapid development of new software, services, and computational
and experimental tools.
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