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Project
SPURport: Grid Portal for SPUR Project
Grant Number EEC0121989

PI: Tomasz Haupt
Team Members: Anand Kalyanasundaram


Description:

Under this effort, currently underway, a Web-based distributed interactive simulation framework is being created to facilitate investigation of the response of urban regions to a major earthquake and to educate future earthquake engineers. The goal is to provide damage estimates based on the best available information. Ultimately this will lead to earthquake related risk analysis enabling policy-makers and emergency response agencies to plan for remediation and emergency response through what-if scenarios.

Critical for the success of this distributed framework is an adequate middle-tier support that would allow for coupling of ground motion simulation codes with structural response simulations, with the capability of accessing many different input data sets and modifying simulation parameters. The configuration files must be persistent, as the simulations are to be performed repeatedly by non-expert users. This is a multidisciplinary effort undertaken jointly with researchers from Mississippi State University, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, Berkeley with NSF support.

SPURport Goals

The SPURport goal is to provide the earthquake community with a collaborative environment for research on Seismic Performance of Urban Regions (SPUR) and training of future earthquake engineers. It demonstrates the ability to use NEESgrid resources at any location through a Web Browser. For the first time, the NEESgrid software releases are used in a substantial application and it gives us an opportunity to provide NEESgrid developers feedback. Finally, it adds to the simulation capability of NEES.

Functionality of SPURport



The fundamental functionality of the SPURport is performing realtime simulations of structural responses to ground motion caused by an earthquake. The steps needed to set-up simulations are shown in Figure 1.The context for a simulation is determined by three components: the earthquake model, the structure model and the inventory of structures. The earthquake model (or fault type) defines the ground motion. The actual simulations of earthquakes, very complex and computationally expensive have been performed by our collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University [4], and the SPURport provides access to a repository of the results of these simulations. The structure models, as well as OpenSees-based structure simulation framework have been provided by our partners at University of California at Berkeley [5]. Finally, the earthquake region is populated by structures of a given type and the performance of the entire population is simulated. The result is a distribution of potential damages in the region. The statistical analysis of population performance has been done off-line (again, computationally very expensive), and SPURport provides access to the repository of results.

SPURport Front End

The Front End of SPURport is a Chef teamlet, and thus it is seamlessly integrated with the rest of the EESgrid user interface. This integration makes it possible to directly use NEESgrid/Chef user authentication mechanisms. The SPURport user interface is implemented as a single applet.

An example snapshot of the SPURport interface is shown in a figure below. For a selected earthquake model (idealized thrust in this case), the user
may examine the earthquake characteristics (here a spatial distribution of Umax for ductility = 2 and pariod = 6; left panel). For selected parametrized structure model (here the shear beam model), the user selects a particular instance of the model (here 10 story building type B; top right panel) and selects its location on the earthquake map (by clicking on the left panel; the selected location is marked as a white dot). This completes configuring a simulation. Now, by clicking "Run" button the user can submit the simulation to run on a selected target system, and the results are visualized in real time in the central panel. Alternativly, the user may replay previously run simulation from the list displayed in the bottom right panel.



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Status of the Project

A prototype of the system has been demonstrated at NEES awardee meeting
at Oregon State University, September 2003, Supercomputing 2003, Phoenix, November 2003 and High Performance and Distributed Computing (HPDC-13) Conference, Honolulu, June, 2004.



Further development of the SPURport has been postponed untill 2nd half of 2004. In NEESport, a grid portal for OpenSees .