Advancing Earthquake Engineering Research through Cyberinfrastructure

This paper describes the cyberinfrastructure (CI) of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) and examines the evidence that this infrastructure is facilitating earthquake engineering research. Among the key features of the CI are the NEES Project Warehouse (PW), which is a data repository for earthquake engineering, an environment that supports the use of tools for web-based data analysis and simulation, and tools that support research collaboration. The value that such CI offers to the user community is discussed. The CI also gathers a myriad of usage statistics, some of which are presented in this paper. Among them are the number of users, pageviews, recorded NEES projects, and other stored resources. This information demonstrates that the CI is used significantly and increasingly so.