NEES Cyberinfrastructure: A Foundation for Innovative Research and Education

1. NEES Cyberinfrastructure: A Foundation for Innovative Research and Education Dr. Thomas Hacker Dr. Rudi Eigenmann, Dr. Ellen Rathje The George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation

2. Vision for NEES • Facilitate access to the world's best integrated network of state-of-the art physical simulation facilities • Build a cyber-enabled community that shares ideas, data, and computational tools and models. • Promote education and training for the next generation of researchers and practitioners. • Cultivate partnerships with other organizations to disseminate research results, leverage cyberinfrastructure, and reduce risk by transferring results into practice.

3. NEES cyberinfrastructure goals • Provide a reliable, robust, and responsive IT infrastructure for the NEES network • Cyberinfrastructure driven by user requirements • Data • Curated research data repository • Data visualization tools • Software tools • Provide a framework to provide access to data and tools developed by the community • Telepresence and teleoperation tools and services • Support the reuse of NEES data • Simulation tools for earthquake engineering research and education • Community and collaboration • Access to national supercomputing resources • Middleware and cybersecurity

4. Driven by user requirements • Based on the needs of the community • Frequent prototypes and feedback from earthquake engineering community • Best development practices • Project schedule based development • Prototype pre-releases for community feedback • Trouble ticket system for collecting problem reports and recording resolution

5. Visual Data

6. Data • The most enduring asset of the NEES network • Many forms of data • Numerical data from sensors, simulation, and analysis output • Visual data from photographs, images, and figures • Video data from high definition cameras • Reports, papers, documentation, and calibration information • Data contributed from the community • Lots of useful data available for researchers and practitioners • Encourage practitioners, researchers, and international contributions • Example of the types of data from a project • Collaborative Research: Using NEES as a Testbed for Studying Soil-Foundation-Structure Interaction, PI Saiidi • Stored in NEEShub

7. Raw sensor data

8. Bringing it together: NEES Project Warehouse Project Description Page

9. NEES Project Warehouse • Tremendous amount of data, in many different forms • Difficult for a researcher to navigate and distill meaning from data • Project Warehouse seeks to simplify data navigation • Summarizes the key aspects of an experiment • Allows end user to decide whether the experiment is of value to them. • Supports the visualization and inspection of data directly in the repository • No need to download large data amounts the user’s computer • Provides a simple search and review interface • Each project in the Warehouse has an overview page • Abstract of project • Tabs to quickly navigate to experiments, team members, and data • Data (PDF, excel, text) is stored in files

10. Description of Experiments

11. Viewing and Retrieving Data

12. Project Search

13. Search Results Optional project tree display

14. Viewing and Using Data

16. Displacement plot of the shake table

17. Community and collaboration • NEEShub provides a group space for collaboration • Users can create, join, and participate in groups • Manage email lists and email archive • Common dropbox for sharing files • Discussion and wiki • Provides wishliststo collect user feedback on improvements

20. Images courtesy of Ann Catlin, Purdue

21. Bringing it together: Tools • Isolated data components have limited utility • Single image or file has limited contextual information • Value comes from integration of tools and data • NEEShub provides a tool to bring together data and context • Provides a framework to provide access to tools developed by the community • An environment that integrates software tools with images, sensor data, and data analysis • Ability to run tools within the web environment without the need to download and install individual tools

22. Software Tools • NEES community has developed software tools for research and education • NEEShub provides an environment in which these tools can operate • Direct web execution of tools at nees.org • Takes advantage of data and tool co-location • Tool execution platform is physically close to the data repository • Speeds transfer of data from repository to tools • Users will be able to inspect large data volumes without incurring excessive data transfer times

23. Example Tool: GOYA Developed at the Nagoya Institute of Technology Designed to be downloaded and installed on user’s computer NEEShub provides the framework to run GOYA through a web interface

26. Conclusions • Working to provide innovative cyberinfrastructure for the network • Goal of integrating the geographically distributed NEES resources and the user community. • Focusing on the management of research data • NEEShub • Provides easy access to data • Combines analysis and simulation tools with data • Provides advanced functionality through a web portal • Framework for community driven cyberinfrastructure