HPCwire: Humanities and HPC Connect at NERSC

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December 22, 2008

Humanities and HPC Connect at NERSC

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BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 22 -- High performance computing and the humanities are finally connecting -- with a little matchmaking help from the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Both organizations have teamed up to create the Humanities High Performance Computing Program, a one-of-a-kind initiative that gives humanities researchers access to some of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

As part of this special collaboration, the DOE's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will dedicate a total of one million compute hours on its supercomputers and technical training to humanities experts. Meanwhile, the program's participants were selected through a highly competitive peer review process led by the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities.

"A connection between the humanities and high performance computing communities had never been formally established until this collaboration between DOE and NEH. The partnership allows us to realize the full potential of supercomputers to help us gain a better understanding of our world and history," says Katherine Yelick, NERSC Division Director.

The selected projects are currently getting up to speed with NERSC systems and staff.

"Supercomputers have been a vital tool for science, contributing to numerous breakthroughs and discoveries. The Endowment is pleased to partner with DOE to now make these resources and opportunities available to humanities scholars as well, and we look forward to seeing how the same technology can further their work," says NEH Chairman Bruce Cole.

Three projects have been selected to participate in the program's inaugural run.

The Perseus Digital Library Project, led by Gregory Crane of Tufts University in Medford, Mass., will use NERSC systems to measure how the meanings of words in Latin and Greek have changed over their lifetimes, and compare classic Greek and Latin texts with literary works written in the past 2,000 years. Team members say the work will be similar to methods currently used to detect plagiarism. The technology will analyze the linguistic structure of classical texts and reveal modern pieces of literature, written or translated into English, which may have been influenced by the classics.

"High performance computing really allows us to ask questions on a scale that we haven't been able to ask before. We'll be able to track changes in Greek from the time of Homer to the Middle Ages. We'll be able to compare the 17th century works of John Milton to those of Vergil, which were written around the turn of the millennium, and try to automatically find those places where Paradise Lost is alluding to the Aeneid, even though one is written in English and the other in Latin," says David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with the Perseus Project.

According to Bamman, the basic methods for creating such a literary analysis tool have existed for some time, but the capability for analyzing such a huge collection of texts couldn't be fully developed due to a lack of compute power. He notes that the collaboration with DOE and NERSC eliminates that roadblock.

In addition to tracking changes in ancient literature, NERSC computers will also be reconstructing ancient artifacts and architecture with the High Performance Computing for Processing and Analysis of Digitized 3-D Models of Cultural Heritage project, led by David Koller, Assistant Director of the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) in Charlottesville, Va.

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