Mete Sozen, a professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, has seen firsthand how devastating an earthquake can be. He was part of a team of investigators sent to Turkey, his home country, after a quake leveled an area there in August 1999. He knows that within 30 years, the country is likely to suffer another earthquake, in Istanbul, home to more than 12 million people. And he wants the country to be prepared.
“It will affect the economy of the entire east Mediterranean unless measures are taken to reduce the impact,” said Mr. Sozen.
He and a Purdue colleague, Nicoletta Adamo-Villani, an assistant professor of computer-graphics technology, designed and built — with help from students — a 3-D model of a new satellite city that Turks displaced from an earthquake could inhabit. The virtual city was created in two months using TeraGrid, a large-scale computing project that Purdue helps run. —Andrea L. Foster
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