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[Greg Wood <>]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
217.265.0748



First Sites for Online Earthquake Engineering Laboratory Now Up and Running

NEESgrid early adopter sites will test capabilities of infrastructure

CHAMPAIGN, IL, September 10, 2002--The first connections in a network
infrastructure that will link earthquake engineering sites across the
U.S. and create a national virtual earthquake engineering laboratory are
now active at the University of Nevada in Reno, Oregon State University
in Corvallis, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY.

The three sites are the first recipients of NEES-Points of Presence
(NEESpops) on the integrated network that will support the National
Science Foundation's George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake
Engineering Simulation (NEES) project. Called NEESgrid, this
infrastructure will soon link earthquake engineering sites across the
country, provide data storage facilities and repositories, and offer
access to high-performance computing applications used for conducting
simulations. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)
at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) leads the
NEESgrid effort. NCSA's NEESgrid partners are Argonne National
Laboratory, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University
of Southern California (USC), the Collaboratory for Research on
Electronic Work at the University of Michigan,  the UIUC, USC, and
University of Oklahoma  civil engineering departments, and the National
Laboratory for Applied Network Research, based at NCSA.

The three early adopter sites will test capabilities of the NEESgrid as
they are developed and help NEESgrid researchers create a common
infrastructure that can be used across sites and for all NEES
applications. The sites were chosen because they are home to the three
main types of equipment used in earthquake engineering experiments:
centrifuges (RPI), shake tables (University of Nevada), and tsunami wave
tanks (Oregon State).  The sites are connected to each other, as well
as  to NCSA, Argonne, and USC's ISI, through Internet2's Abilene
backbone network at 155 megabits per second.

"Activation of the early adopter sites is the first step toward creating
a national online research community for earthquake engineers working in
the field and in research centers," said Tom Prudhomme, head of NCSA's
Cybercommunities division and principal investigator for the NEESgrid
project. "We will conduct experiments using the equipment at the three
sites and researchers located at other sites. Then, we will evaluate not
only the experiments but the process of using our new infrastructure in
an effort to perfect the system and create a seamless, easy-to-use
online research facility."

The early adopter sites will test collaboration tools, local storage
systems and data repositories, streaming data and video services, and
tele-operations of experimental equipment. Additional NEES equipment
sites, called "shadow sites," will be able to follow the experiments
remotely using the NEES software client configuration  The shadow sites
also will  provide feedback on the usefulness of  NEESgrid applications
and services.

"We need to validate that we are building an infrastructure that serves
the needs of our users," said Carl Kesselman, one of the co-designers of
the NEESgrid and director of the Center for Grid Technologies at
USC/ISI. "The early adopters program will test our infrastructure,
tools, and interfaces so that we can ensure that the NEESgrid is a
valuable online research community that will continue to grow."

By 2004 the NEESgrid will support virtual collaborations among of a
minimum of 15 sites across the country. The NEESgrid system is being
carefully coordinated to allow linkage to the NSF's TeraGrid network, a
system that will offer the world's largest distributed computing
infrastructure for open scientific research. Once the NEESgrid is fully
operational, earthquake engineers will be able to conduct experiments
with colleagues around the country using distributed experimental
equipment, operate experimental equipment remotely, run computer
simulations on remote high-performance computers, and access
repositories of earthquake engineering data for analysis and comparison
to simulations and field data.

For more information on NEESgrid, see: http://www.neesgrid.org

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and
deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and
information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a
National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's
largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for
open scientific research. NCSA also leads  the National Computational
Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced
computational infrastructure for the 21st century. The NSF Partnerships
for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the
Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state
of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and
other federal agencies.  For more information, see: http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu

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