CHAMPAIGN, IL--The first connections in a network infrastructure that will link earthquake engineering sites across the U.S. and create a national virtual earthquake engineering laboratory are now active at the University of Nevada in Reno, Oregon State University in Corvallis, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, NY. The three sites are the first recipients of NEES-Points of Presence (NEESpops) on the integrated network that will support the National Science Foundation's George E. Brown, Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project. Called NEESgrid, this infrastructure will soon link earthquake engineering sites across the country, provide data storage facilities and repositories, and offer access to high-performance computing applications used for conducting simulations. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) leads the NEESgrid effort. NCSA's NEESgrid partners are Argonne National Laboratory, the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC), the Collaboratory for Research on Electronic Work at the University of Michigan, the UIUC, USC, and University of Oklahoma civil engineering departments, and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research, based at NCSA. The three early adopter sites will test capabilities of the NEESgrid as they are developed and help NEESgrid researchers create a common infrastructure that can be used across sites and for all NEES applications. The sites were chosen because they are home to the three main types of equipment used in earthquake engineering experiments: centrifuges (RPI), shake tables (University of Nevada), and tsunami wave tanks (Oregon State). The sites are connected to each other, as well as to NCSA, Argonne, and USC's ISI, through Internet2's Abilene backbone network at 155 megabits per second. "Activation of the early adopter sites is the first step toward creating a national online research community for earthquake engineers working in the field and in research centers," said Tom Prudhomme, head of NCSA's Cybercommunities division and principal investigator for the NEESgrid project. "We will conduct experiments using the equipment at the three sites and researchers located at other sites. Then, we will evaluate not only the experiments but the process of using our new infrastructure in an effort to perfect the system and create a seamless, easy-to-use online research facility." The early adopter sites will test collaboration tools, local storage systems and data repositories, streaming data and video services, and tele-operations of experimental equipment. Additional NEES equipment sites, called shadow sites, will be able to follow the experiments remotely using the NEES software client configuration The shadow sites also will provide feedback on the usefulness of NEESgrid applications and services. "We need to validate that we are building an infrastructure that serves the needs of our users," said Carl Kesselman, one of the co-designers of the NEESgrid and director of the Center for Grid Technologies at USC/ISI. "The early adopters program will test our infrastructure, tools, and interfaces so that we can ensure that the NEESgrid is a valuable online research community that will continue to grow." By 2004 the NEESgrid will support virtual collaborations among of a minimum of 15 sites across the country. The NEESgrid system is being carefully coordinated to allow linkage to the NSF's TeraGrid network, a system that will offer the world's largest distributed computing infrastructure for open scientific research. Once the NEESgrid is fully operational, earthquake engineers will be able to conduct experiments with colleagues around the country using distributed experimental equipment, operate experimental equipment remotely, run computer simulations on remote high-performance computers, and access repositories of earthquake engineering data for analysis and comparison to simulations and field data. For more information on NEESgrid, see www.neesgrid.org