Infrastructure simulation effort has high hopes, faces high hurdles

The continuing availability of vital resources is paramount in ensuring the US national economy's well being. Yet until recently, no attempt was made to form an overreaching computational architecture capable of helping policymakers identify and protect those resources on a national level. The National Infrastructure Simulation and Analysis Center (NISAC), operated by a core partnership at Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories, is being envisioned as the central component of this protective architecture. The laboratories plan to leverage their modeling and simulation experience in areas as varied as nuclear weapons and traffic patterns.