NIMSAT is researching state-of-the-art incident management procedures for profound improvements in the nation's technical ability to respond to and recover from catastrophic incidents. Additionally, it is developing tools that will provide simulations for training and technical support for the management of the disaster lifecycle. Elements in this cycle include prevention, preparation response and recovery.

Among its fundamental goals, NIMSAT cites efforts to enhance understanding of threats and vulnerabilities to the nation's critical infrastructure and to improve the resiliency of private sector supply chains which fuel the national economy.

"SGI's visualization technologies have been and will be instrumental in helping us develop research tools for simulations, training and decision support systems for strategic, tactical and operational support", stated Dr. Ramesh Kolluru executive director for NIMSAT. "SGI's supercomputing technologies enable us to work with our colleagues in the B.I. Moody College of Business at the University of Louisiana to understand the implications of hazards to critical supply chains. These supercomputing assets help us engage in what-if scenario evaluation, which is very important when planning and responding to disasters."

A key element in the NIMSAT initiative is its relationship with the Louisiana Immersive Technologies Enterprise (LITE) facility, one of the world's leading technology resources for industry, government and research. More than a year ago, LITE installed a 160-processor SGI Altix 4700 supercomputer featuring 4.1 terabytes of memory, which enables the facility to compute and visualize computationally complex disaster models, data and scenarios. In addition to its work with LITE, NIMSAT will have access to supercomputing systems at a number of other universities across the country via high speed optical networks such as LambdaRail (NLR).

"Large databases and real-time information feeds from a multitude of sources will be the core of such an operational centre. The next challenge will be to present all these in a way that can support effective response and decision making. Technologies for visually fusing disparate data and media streams can be applied to address this challenge", stated Dr. Eng-Lin Goh, chief technology officer and senior vice president of SGI. "By leveraging one of the world's largest shared-memory systems at LITE, NIMSAT will be able to deliver peta-scale database and geospatial information as well as multi-dimensional visualization for real-time data gathering, synthesis, analysis and dissemination."

"The tight integration of visualization, supercomputing and data management that we are able to accomplish here at LITE will help in enabling NIMSAT in developing tools for disaster management", stated Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira, executive director and chief scientist of LITE. "We believe this will play an essential role in empowering national, state and local incident managers."