DesignSafe Requirements Workshop

 

The NSF’s Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) cyberinfrastructure, DesignSafe, will be much more than IT support for NHERI research.  In DesignSafe, the NHERI community will have access to a comprehensive CI supporting research discovery from data generation through publication and archive.  Specifically, the DesignSafe infrastructure:

  • Will leverage a proven approach. The CI is designed around a set of principles -- derived from other successful CI investments by NSF -- to maximize the science impact of an infrastructure.
  • Will be designed to be responsive to community needs.  The CI will be extensible in almost every aspect, to allow rapid change as community needs evolve (e.g., new data types, new simulation tools, new workflows, etc.).
  • Will be managed by a team with extensive expertise in successful, large scale CI projects, with strong input from the community, and fully within the governance framework of the NHERI solicitation.

Our design approach is centered on drawing input broadly from the community on all aspects of the design.  This community is formed from many groups; from users in the existing NEES community, from researchers who study wind engineering, storm surge, and other hazards, and from researchers across other computational engineering and science domains who have successfully used, designed, and deployed large scale CI within their communities.  This last segment of the community will allow us to determine what has and has not been effective to developing successful CI. To ensure that DesignSafe meets the community’s requirements and is adopted as the place to perform their research, our organizational structure includes requirements teams for data and simulation that are staffed by select leaders in the natural hazards engineering research community. This workshop is to collect information from a broader set of the research community that will shape the architecture of DesignSafe. To span the breadth of domains in natural hazards engineering, researchers with a variety of expertise are attending the workshop – field reconnaissance, experimental facilities, computation and simulation, and big data researchers. The topics to be covered at this workshop are:

  • Research workflow
  • Data management
  • Simulation and modeling 
  • Data analysis and visualization
  • Training