The Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) will be supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a distributed, multi-user national facility that will provide the natural hazards research community with access to research infrastructure that will include earthquake and wind engineering experimental facilities, cyberinfrastructure, computational modeling and simulation tools, and research data, as well as education and community outreach activities. NHERI will be comprised of separate research infrastructure awards for a Network Coordination Office, Cyberinfrastructure, Computational Modeling and Simulation Center, and Experimental Facilities, including a post-disaster, rapid response research facility. Awards made for NHERI will contribute to NSF's role in the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP) and the National Windstorm Impact Reduction Program. NHERI continues NSF's emphasis on earthquake engineering research infrastructure previously supported under the George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation as part of NEHRP, but now broadens that support to include wind engineering research infrastructure. NHERI has the broad goal of supporting research that will improve the resilience and sustainability of civil infrastructure, such as buildings and other structures, underground structures, levees, and critical lifelines, against the natural hazards of earthquakes and windstorms, in order to minimize loss of life, damage, and economic loss. In today's information age, this research requires the integration of data and computation. This award will provide the Cyberinfrastructure component for NHERI. This cyberinfrastructure component will develop the DesignSafe-ci.org web portal, a cyberinfrastructure for the natural hazards engineering community to provide computational tools to manage, analyze, and understand critical data for natural hazards research. DesignSafe-ci.org will include an interactive web interface, data repositories to share data sets, and a cloud-based workspace for researchers to perform simulation, computation, data analysis, and other research tasks. The integration of data and computation in the cloud will enable new research discoveries in natural hazards engineering, which in turn can lead to more hazard-resilient civil infrastructure.
Natural hazards engineering research conducted with NHERI resources will require integration of diverse data sets from a variety of sources, including experiments, computational simulation, field reconnaissance, earth science, social science, building science, and architecture. DesignSafe-ci.org will embrace a "cloud" strategy for the "big data" generated in natural hazards engineering research. It will be designed based upon a set of proven technologies, drawn from other large-scale, NSF-supported open science infrastructures, and will leverage the computing and storage platforms already supported by NSF. DesignSafe-ci.org will provide a comprehensive cyberinfrastructure that supports research workflows, data analysis and visualization, and the full lifecycle of experimental, field, and computational data required by engineers and scientists to effectively address the threats posed to civil infrastructure by natural hazards. DesignSafe-ci.org will include the following resources: (1) interactive DesignSafe-ci.org web portal, (2) Data Depot, a flexible data repository with streamlined data management tools, (3) Reconnaissance Integration Portal, which provides access to post-disaster, rapid response research reconnaissance data through a geospatial framework, (4) Discovery Workspace, which allows simulation, data analytics, and visualization to be performed in the cloud and linked with data in the Data Depot, (5) Learning Center, which provides training and educational materials, and (6) Developer's Portal for users to develop new cyberinfrastructure capabilities. This award will also provide the natural hazards research community with access to high performance computing resources and user support, data curation, and publisher services.
