The award provides funding to NEES Consortium, Inc., to build its headquarters infrastructure during FY 2004. NEES Consortium, Inc., was incorporated in January 2003. Its primary mission will be to management, operate, and maintain, during FY 2005 - FY 2014, the equipment site infrastructure and NEESgrid cyberinfrastructure being developed under the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES). NEES is an NSF-funded Major Research Equipment and Facilities Construction (MREFC) project under construction during FY 2000 - FY 2004. When completed by September 30, 2004, NEES will be national, networked simulation resource of 15 geographically distributed, shared use experimental research equipment sites, with teleobservation and teleoperation capabilities, to advance earthquake engineering research and education through collaborative and integrated experimentation, computation, theory, databases, and model-based simulation and to improve the seismic design and performance of U.S. civil and mechanical infrastructure systems. NEES research equipment includes shake tables, geotechnical centrifuges, a tsunami wave basin, large-scale laboratory experimentation systems, and mobile and permanently installed field equipment, networked together through the high performance Internet. NEESgrid, under development by a multi-institutional team led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, will enable telepresence and distributed experimentation at the equipment sites and provide a curated repository for experimental and analytical earthquake engineering and related data, collaborative tools, and a simulation tools repository. This award enables the Consortium to hire an Executive Director, Site Operations Manager, Executive Assistant, and webmaster, as well as establish the Consortium headquarters office. This award includes a subaward to High Performance Technologies, Inc., to conduct an independent validation and verification of the NEESgrid software. Information about project activities will be available at www.nees.org.
