ENGINEERING

RENO, NV--The earthquake engineering community will see what it's like to conduct experiments through an online collaborative laboratory when researchers demonstrate an early version of the Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) infrastructure, or NEESgrid, designed to enable a new generation of collaborative research in civil and structural engineering. The demonstration at the NEES partners' meeting at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) will use shake tables equipped with sensors to simulate an earthquake. The experimental data will be streamed live to the NEESgrid, where it will be visualized, reviewed and analyzed. Once the NEESgrid is fully operational, similar experimental data will be streamed to sites across the country, where earthquake engineers without physical access to expensive simulation systems will be able to view and remotely control experiments, collaborate with colleagues, and analyze data. "This will be the first opportunity for the engineering community to see the components of the NEESgrid interoperating," said Dan Reed, principal investigator for NEESgrid and director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), which leads the NEESgrid effort. "The demonstration will highlight the capabilities the NEESgrid will offer when fully deployed. Our goal is to change the way earthquake engineering research is done by giving engineers the ability to operate research equipment from remote locations and collaborate with their distributed colleagues in real time. A central data repository will allow experimenters and collaborators to publish their results and to examine and compare data from other experiments." Funded by the National Science Foundation, NEESgrid will connect research sites that are part of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project, creating a national virtual laboratory for earthquake engineering research and engineering analysis. The NEESgrid will link earthquake engineering equipment--such as centrifuges, shake tables, and tsunami wave tanks--data repositories, applications, and collaboration tools through a high-performance network. UNR, home to three shake tables, became one of the first three NEESgrid equipment site connections late last summer. The NEESgrid also connects Oregon State University, Corvallis, and its tsunami wave tank, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and its experimental centrifuge. The grid demonstration will take place Thursday, Nov. 14, and will begin with a model of a two-span bridge equipped with sensors to detect, capture, and display displacements. Data from the simulated earthquake will stream live through the NEESgrid connection and a video processor and video streaming server will digitize and stream visual information. The captured data initially will be stored on the NEESgrid and later transferred to another workstation using GridFTP, a data transfer protocol optimized for high-bandwidth, wide-area networks. After the data is transferred, a wide range of tools can be used for deeper analysis. Eventually, all NEES experimental data will be stored in a central repository housed at NCSA. The NEESgrid team will present a similar demonstration at the National Computational Science Alliance research exhibit at SC2002, the annual high-performance computing and networking conference. SC2002 will be held at the Baltimore Convention Center Nov. 16-22 and demonstrations will be offered Tuesday, Nov. 19 through Thursday, Nov. 21.