Abstract

This chapter describes the experiences and lessons learned from the NEESgrid project, an interdisciplinary effort to develop and deploy cyberinfrastructure for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). Cyberinfrastructure is a concept used to describe the combination of computers, networks, services, and applications that scientists and engineers increasingly rely on to conduct their research (Atkins et al. 2003). In the NEES case, the cyberinfrastructure activity focused on a $10 million cooperative agreement over the period 2001–2004 to build NEESgrid. NEESgrid was envisioned to be a collaboratory for earthquake engineering, where a collaboratory uses cyberinfrastructure to join resources (eg, instruments), people, and data via computer-supported systems (Finholt 2002, 2003).
Earthquake engineering is the field of civil engineering concerned with the performance of built environments under seismic loading. Benjamin Sims (1999) provides an excellent detailed overview of the practice in the earthquake engineering field. Briefly, earthquake engineering has three broad modes of inquiry described as structural, geotechnical, and field experimental. The majority of earthquake engineering researchers portray themselves as doing structural research. Primary methods of conducting structural research include physical simulation, such as the testing of scale structures and components on hydraulically actuated shake tables or reaction walls (eg, see the pictures of equipment at the University of Nevada at Reno and the University of Minnesota in figure 18.1), and …

Date

October 31, 2008

Authors

BF Spencer Jr, Randal Butler, Kathleen Ricker, Doru Marcusiu, Thomas A Finholt, Ian Foster, Carl Kesselman, Jeremy P Birnholtz

Journal

Scientific Collaboration on the Internet

Pages

331