DesignSafe: New Cyberinfrastructure for Natural Hazards Engineering

Natural hazards engineering plays an important role in minimizing the effects of natural hazards on society through the design of resilient and sustainable infrastructure. The DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure has been developed to enable and facilitate transformative research in natural hazards engineering, which necessarily spans across multiple disciplines and can take advantage of advancements in computation, experimentation, and data analysis. DesignSafe allows researchers to more effectively share and find data using cloud services, perform numerical simulations using high performance computing, and integrate diverse datasets so that researchers can make discoveries that were previously unattainable. This paper describes the design principles used in the cyberinfrastructure development process, introduces the main components of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure, and illustrates the use of the DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure in research in natural hazards engineering through various examples.