NEESgrid: A New Paradigm for Advanced Earthquake Engineering Experimentation and Simulation

摘要

NEESgrid, the system integration component of the NEES project, links earthquake researchers across the U. S. with leading-edge computing resources and research equipment, allowing collaborative teams (including remote participants) to plan, perform, and publish their experiments. The integrated tools and components made available by NEESgrid enable earthquake engineering simulation—both physical and numerical—providing an environment for researchers to develop increasingly complex, comprehensive, and accurate models of how structures of all kinds respond to earthquake loadings. In this paper, various NEESgrid components are introduced and their roles in NEESgrid are identified. Subsequently, the Multi-Site Online Simulation Testbed (MOST) experiment, which was conducted on July 30, 2003 to showcase the NEESgrid software capabilities, will be discussed. The MOST experiment coupled two large-scale physical experiments in Illinois and Colorado with a computational simulation. This paper also describes the Mini-MOST experiment, which is a tool for NEESgrid education, training and outreach. The success of the MOST and Mini-MOST experiments demonstrates the significant potential of Grid technologies in engineering research and more importantly, the experience gained offered us a better insight on how to build and deploy effective Grid applications in the future.