This Monday and Tuesday we had a workshop on Digital Humanities And High Performance Computing here at McMaster. The workshop that was sponsored by SHARCNET was organized to identify challenges, opportunities and concrete steps that can be taken to support humanists interested in HPC techniques. Materials for the workshop are now on my wiki philosophi.ca, but will soon migrate to SHARCNET’s.
The intersection of the humanities and HPC is heating up. We aren’t the only people developing encounters. The NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) has a Humanities High Performance Computing Resource Page that describes grant programs for humanists. One program with the DOE gives humanists support and cycles on machines at the NERSC. The support will be crucial – one thing that came out in our workshop is that humanists need training and support to imagine HPC projects. In particular we need support to clean up our data to the point where it is tractable to HPC methods.
The workshop brought digital humanists, HPC folk, and grant council representatives from across Southern Ontario. Pictures are coming!
Update: Materials about this workshop are now on the SHARCNET DH-HPC wiki.