This award is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER). Many scientific and engineering research communities are developing large multidisciplinary collaborations to develop cyberinfrastructure (CI). The goal of CI is to create virtual environments, where researchers and educators can access distributed resources (e.g., computational tools and services, instruments, experiments, and data). Although CI initiatives are expected to have a significant impact on research productivity and there is considerable enthusiasm around the promise of CI, there has been little systematic evaluation of CI initiatives to date. This project is a pilot study to conduct an evaluation of the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) CI. NEES became operational in 2004 as a shared use experimental and cyber infrastructure for the earthquake engineering and related communities. At the heart of NEES is "NEESit," the NEES cyberinfrastructure center that develops, deploys, and operates the set of CI systems and applications used to link earthquake engineers across the United States with leading-edge computational resources, research equipment (i.e., the fifteen NEES equipment sites), simulation and visualization tools, and collaborators to plan, perform, and publish experiments. NEES is managed by NEES Consortium, Inc. (NEESinc), through NSF cooperative agreement CMMI-0402490, who oversees both NEES equipment sites and NEESit. The NEES CI evaluation has two objectives: (1) to examine how NEES CI facilitates researcher access to distributed resources and the impact such access has on research productivity, and (2) to inform ongoing and future CI-based initiatives. In order to accomplish both objectives, the evaluation is designed to not only assess NEES CI, but also provide assessment data to benchmark NEES CI against other NSF-funded CI-based environments (e.g. TeraGrid, LEAD, and WATERS Network). Evaluation methods include interviews, observations of scientists and engineers at work, surveys, and bibliometrics.
This project includes an examination and evaluation of mechanisms within NEES that support CI use in general, and knowledge sourcing and multi-site researcher collaboration activities, specifically. Contributions of this work include improved theoretical understanding of how CI can function to enhance these activities, practical suggestions about the design of CI to facilitate them, and specific feedback about how NEES CI is aiding them within the earthquake engineering community. CI is a major NSF investment on many fronts. This project's evaluation methodology will follow those used to investigate the same phenomena in different NSF-funded CI-based environments. This approach will help assimilate findings with other CI research communities, which means the lessons learned and promising practices identified in the course of specific evaluations can inform the design of CI-based environments more generally. Results will be disseminated through presentations at conferences and workshops as well as publications that are relevant to scholars, policy makers, and NEES stakeholders. This award is part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program.
