Disaster Risk Management Through the DesignSafe Cyberinfrastructure

Abstract

DesignSafe addresses the challenges of supporting integrative data-driven research in natural hazards engineering. It is an end-to-end data management, communications, and analysis platform where users collect, generate, analyze, curate, and publish large data sets from a variety of sources, including experiments, simulations, field research, and post-disaster reconnaissance. DesignSafe achieves key objectives through: (1) integration with high performance and cloud-computing resources to support the computational needs of the regional risk assessment community; (2) the possibility to curate and publish diverse data structures emphasizing relationships and understandability; and (3) facilitation of real time communications during natural hazards events and disasters for data and information sharing. The resultant services and tools shorten data cycles for resiliency evaluation, risk modeling validation, and forensic studies. This article illustrates salient features of the cyberinfrastructure. It summarizes its design principles, architecture, and functionalities. The focus is on case studies to show the impact of DesignSafe on the disaster risk community. The Next Generation Liquefaction project collects and standardizes case histories of earthquake-induced soil liquefaction into a relational database—DesignSafe—to permit users to interact with the data. Researchers can correlate in DesignSafe building dynamic characteristics based on data from building sensors, with observed damage based on ground motion measurements. Reconnaissance groups upload, curate, and publish wind, seismic, and coastal damage data they gather during field reconnaissance missions, so these datasets are available shortly after a disaster. As a part of the education and community outreach efforts of DesignSafe, training materials and collaboration space are also offered to the disaster risk management community.

Laboratory Component of Next-Generation Liquefaction Project Database

“…Currently the laboratory component of the NGL database cannot be accessed in the same manner as the field case history component via the interactive website (https://nextgenerationliquefaction.org; https://www.doi.org/10.21222/C2J040) because there has not been adequate time or budget to add that capability. However, the database is replicated daily to DesignSafe [2], where it can be queried by any user using Python scripts in Jupyter notebooks. A Jupyter notebook is a server-client application that allows editing and running notebook documents in a web browser and combines rich text elements and computer code executed by a Python kernel [4].…”

“…A Jupyter notebook is a server-client application that allows editing and running notebook documents in a web browser and combines rich text elements and computer code executed by a Python kernel [4]. Jupyter notebooks are published and available on DesignSafe in the NGL project partner data apps (Brandenberg et al [2] and references therein). Users can create their own custom Jupyter notebooks to query and visualize data from the NGL database for use in model development.…”

“…The types of information available in the database are test-specific and include processeddata quantities such as stress and strain rather than raw data such as load and displacement. The database is replicated in DesignSafe-CI [2] where users can write queries in Python scripts within Jupyter notebooks to interact with the data.…”

StEER: A Community-Centered Approach to Assessing the Performance of the Built Environment after Natural Hazard Events

“…More importantly, the arrival of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI) signaled a departure from the historical silos separating hazards and disciplines by offering communal research infrastructure. Event responses could now be backed by investments in shared hardware for field data collection (Berman et al, 2020), cyberinfrastructure for streamlined data curation (Rathje et al, 2017;Pinelli et al, 2020), and opportunities for data re-use to inform backend computational simulations (Deierlein et al, 2020). With the arrival of NHERI Converge and its network of extreme events reconnaissance and research (EER) organizations (Peek et al, 2020), StEER and GEER both have new potentials for interdisciplinary investigations and longitudinal studies.…”

Distributed Simulation Platforms and Data Passing Tools for Natural Hazards Engineering: Reviews, Limitations, and Recommendations

“…Even though the design is driven by distributing computation across multiple computing devices with limited processing power, it can also benefit from existing cyberinfrastructure. For example, DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure provides convenient cloud-based tools to access data deports and high-performance computing (HPC) (Rathje et al 2017;Pinelli et al 2020;Rathje et al 2020). In this case, simulator (or sub-simulator) functions can run on HPC to utilize its computation ability and message wrappers can run on a local device to handle data exchange including retrieving data from cloud or other simulators, feeding data to its associated simulator functions, retrieving simulated results, and providing data to other simulators.…”