NEESgrid Officially Online

In September, the NEESgrid Systems Integration Team, led by NCSA and UIUC, completed the bulk of its work. NEESgrid is the software that allows earthquake researchers to integrate physical experimentation and model-based simulation, computational analysis, and improved testing and validation of increasingly complex and comprehensive analytical and numerical models. Support for NEES software and services has transitioned to the NEES IT Cyberinfrastructure Center (NEESit) at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, which, in a partnership with Oregon State University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California at Berkeley, will now be responsible for the grid's maintenance and operations. Members of the SI team will continue to collaborate with NEESit to further enhance the NEESgrid's capabilities.

The NEESgrid connects earthquake engineering researchers throughout the United States. Building on the idea of integrating physical and computational simulations, the NEESgrid software brings together components for sharing knowledge, enabling researchers to breach disciplinary and geographical barriers. NEESgrid was developed through close collaboration by a broad spectrum of civil engineering departments, computational science centers, national laboratories, and private sector partners, including NCSA and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The NEESgrid core features include passive and active telepresence services that allow remote observation and control of the experiment; streaming data services that enable data transfer from the local acquisition system to the remote users and to repositories; and data and metadata management services that allow storing and retrieving data from the NEESgrid repository. The user access to this collaborative environment is provided by a Web-based customizable user interface that integrates a suite of tools for experiment planning, execution, analysis, and publication. The system uses core grid services for sign-on, security, and managing resources.