NEES IT Tools to Advance Earthquake Engineering Research and Practice

NEESit is a service-focused organization that operates and supports the extensive IT infrastructure of the Network for Earthquake Engineering and Simulation (NEES) Collaboratory. The mission of NEESit is to provide software and services that link earthquake researchers with leading edge computing resources and research equipment, allowing collaborative teams at equipment sites or from remote locations to plan, perform, and publish their experiments. The software tools are classified into four categories: data management software for organizing and sharing data, telepresence tools for enabling remote participation in experiment planning and execution, visualization capabilities for viewing historical sensor data and synchronized video images, collaboration services for joint research effots and simulation software for computational modeling. The infrastructure services are classified into three categories: user support, supercomputing allocations, and a community code repository. NEESit has also pursued education and outreach strategies to promote learning and communication amongst the IT and earthquake engineering communities. This paper discusses the IT software tools and infrastructure services, which integrate custom-built software with commercial, off-the-shelf components.