Humanities High Performance Computing

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Office of Science in the United States Department of Energy (DOE) are working together to provide humanities scholars with access to DOE supercomputers. These grants provide computer time on DOE machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as training and support to enable scholars to take full advantage of those resources. Interested scholars will apply directly to NERSC, and hours will be awarded under the terms of the DOE's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. The INCITE program was conceived specifically to seek out computationally intensive, large-scale research projects with the potential to significantly advance key areas in science and engineering. With this partnership with NEH, the hope is that comparable research projects in the humanities will be able to take advantage of high performance computing resources. Successful applicants will be given access to computer and support resources at NERSC. In addition, winners will receive travel reimbursement funds to enable them (up to two people per project) to attend on-site training at NERSC. Any scholar whose humanities research is computationally intensive may apply. Supported activities may include: mining of large textual datasets, morphological analysis, manipulations, and transformations; analysis of geographical information systems data, maps, etc.; and computationally demanding visualization, modeling, and pattern recognition and analysis. The goal of the program is to provide opportunities for humanities scholars whose research requires high performance computing to collaborate with computer scientists and others at centers already familiar with the challenges of intensive data mining, visualization, and other demanding applications.