IT Infastructure

NEESit: The Information Technology that Integrates NEES

A central goal of the NEES program is to enable remote collaborations involving people around the country and around the globe. This means that "remote users" - including not just researchers, but practicing engineers, students, or even classrooms of schoolchildren - can use NEES's advanced IT capabilities to interact, share information, and observe experiments as they run in NEES's Experimental Facilities>laboratory facilities. Researchers with the appropriate credentials can even activate equipment from remote locations.

Another key NEES goal is to establish a curated data repository where research data from all NEES experiments are available for shared use. To be successful, this repository must contain not only the original data, but also related information such as who designed the experiment, who participated, what the goals were, how many sensors of which types were used, how the data were actually generated, etc.

What makes this all possible is a robust foundation of technology that links people and facilities into a next-generation shared laboratory, or collaboratory

NEESit Services

To facilitate the long-term round-the-clock operation of production-level services that are flexible and responsive to changing priorities, NEESit has adopted what's called a "services-based approach" including the following components:

  • Scheduled Network and Grid Services - Wide area network, reliable and secure transport of data, and robust system-level software
  • Data Ingestion Services - Tools for describing data as well as the software supporting the capture and storing of experimental data
  • Data Storage Services - Reliable and long term data archive for storing the results of physical and computational experiments
  • Collaboration Services - Support for project-oriented discussion groups, document sharing, and community bulletin boards
  • Web Services - NEESinc web pages, training materials, and user documentation
  • Telepresence Services - Support for remote participation in experiments, real-time video and data viewing, and videoconferencing
  • Data Search and Analysis Services - Tools and interfaces for searching and retrieving experimental data
  • Visualization Services - Tools for visualizing experimental data
  • Simulation Services - Tools for performing numerical simulations and interfacing simulations with experimental functions
  • User Support Services - Support for user calls and email questions, electronic discussion groups, documentation, training, and user satisfaction surveys
More About NEESit

Find out more by visiting the NEESit website.