New computer technology developed at Purdue University will help put Indiana near the epicenter of earthquake-related research for the next five years.

The technology was a crucial part of Purdue’s successful bid, announced Thursday, for a $105 million National Science Foundation grant that places Purdue in charge of coordinating earthquake research at 14 U.S. universities.

The West Lafayette school’s bid “had to be exceptional across the board,” said NSF spokesman Joshua Chamot, “but its IT capabilities were certainly a major positive.”

The announcement of Purdue’s largest-ever grant bodes well for Indiana’s technology industry, said TechPoint president and chief executive Jim Jay, especially coming a day after Indiana University announced a $10.1 million supercomputing grant from the NSF.

“It not only cements our position as Crossroads of America but as crossroads of the world with this development of infrastructure,” said Jay, whose Indianapolis-based company promotes technology-based enterprise and economic development. “This is quite a success story for Indiana’s IT community.”

Purdue’s technology will allow researchers around the world to quickly share and evaluate the results of elaborate experiments using such equipment as shake tables — parking lot-size platforms that simulate earthquakes and measure their effects on various buildings.

The Purdue grant comes in exchange for overseeing the George E. Brown Jr. Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation, or NEES, a group of researchers from 14 universities across the country.

Purdue takes over from a Davis, Calif.-based nonprofit called the NEES Consortium, which had managed the project since 2004.

“It doesn’t mean anything bad happened at Davis,” Chamot said. “There wasn’t some emergency. It’s part of our standards that our large projects are re-competed on a regular basis.”

Purdue’s contract begins Oct. 1 and runs through 2015.

The key to Purdue receiving the grant was its development of information technology components that allow researchers access to others’ experimental models without needing direct access to a supercomputer.

The technology, in development for a decade, “makes it possible to almost instantly run a computer application someone else has created without having to download and install anything,” said Rudolph Eigenmann, a Purdue electrical and computer engineering professor who helped develop the technology and helped secure the NSF grant.

Using that technology, Purdue will be responsible for gathering the data and making it available to earthquake engineering researchers around the world, a community of about 10,000 people. Purdue will hire 20 people to staff its new operation — half of them software engineers, the rest administrators.

Under the grant, Purdue also will manage the experiments at the 14 universities, including paying the researchers and maintaining their huge and elaborate equipment.

Such research could help prevent loss of life and property in earthquake-prone areas around the world. The U.S. Geological Survey counted 124 major earthquakes in the past decade, catastrophes responsible for nearly a half-million deaths.

Purdue will spend two-thirds of the NSF money to manage the research program. Purdue will receive $20 million to $24 million each year and dispense about $1 million to each of the 14 sites based on proposals. About $5 million to $6 million will stay at Purdue annually to fund the center and pay for upkeep of the digital infrastructure.

“Taking 14 large labs and making them work cohesively, that takes a lot of work,” said Jacobo Bielak, an earthquake engineering expert from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But the hardest part is management of the data. I think it’s a great honor to the people of Purdue.”

The NSF declined to say how many universities or other organizations competed for the grant.

Purdue President France A. Crdova is a member of the NSF’s governing board but did not deliberate on the award, according to a statement by Purdue.

The NSF, with its annual budget of $6 billion, funds about 20 percent of all federally supported research on U.S. college campuses.

Call Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043.