HPCwire: I-CHASS Earns $250,000 NEH Grant

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

September 05, 2008

I-CHASS Earns $250,000 NEH Grant

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Sept. 5 -- The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts and Social Science (I-CHASS / www.chass.uiuc.edu) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IADTH) grant for almost $250,000 for 2008-2009. These grants support national or multi-state training programs on approaches in humanities computing and seek to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research.

I-CHASS will lead a collaboration partnering the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA / www.ncsa.uiuc.edu), the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC / www.psc.edu), and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC / www.sdsc.edu) that will foster innovation in the research and development of computational resources for humanities research groups. This partnership, called Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC), will engage scholars in sustained collaboration with high-performance computing specialists in order to identify, create, and adapt computational tools and methods focusing on simulation and modeling, social networking, grid and distributed computing, data analytics, or visualization technologies. The grant will facilitate nine mini-residencies (three at each supercomputing center) and a two-day conference for 45 humanities participants and 15 high-performance computing specialists. The grant also will support the construction and maintenance of a virtual community for participants and the larger public that will function as an online collaboratory space.

"The Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory has the potential to transform humanities, arts, and social science research," said I-CHASS director Vernon Burton. "It creates the opportunity for researchers to educate themselves in high-performance computing technologies with help from nationally-recognized computing specialists while those specialists are provided with sophisticated researchers who can advise on the technological needs of humanities, arts, and social science scholarship and research. This model of collaborative engagement will foster innovation in the research and development of computational resources for humanities research groups."

"PSC is excited to be included in the opportunities that the IADTH program will make available to the humanities, arts and social sciences communities," said Laura McGinnis, manager of PSC's Data & Information Resource Services group. "We are looking forward to sharing our depth and breadth of technology with disciplines that traditionally have not made use of high-end resources."

"SDSC looks forward to working with the University of Illinois to offer Data Challenges in the Humanities, a workshop that will feature case studies that highlight data curation and preservation challenges," said Diane Baxter, director of education for SDSC. "These studies will help us explore technology solutions and community-led technology initiatives that have addressed similar challenges."

The humanities groups selected for the 2008-2009 mini-residencies are:

Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the "Middle Ages" (SCGMA) Group.
Humanistic Algorithms Group.
HistorySpace Project.

The SCGMA Group has been collaborating with I-CHASS, the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR / http://seasr.org/) project, the Center for Medieval Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the Program in Medieval Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, and the Communications Department at the University of California-San Diego since May 2007 to develop a new interdisciplinary scholarly community for globalizing the study of the Middle Ages. SCGMA has been working to create an online infrastructure to support the organization of, and research with, sources in multiple formats and languages available from multiple scholarly disciplines in order to organize large quantities of textual, visual, and aural resources. HPC will allow SCGMA to extend its current use of high-performance technologies to encompass a more elaborate technological model.

The Humanistic Algorithms project is a collaboration between SEASR, I-CHASS, and the University of Southern California's Institute for Multimedia Literary that focuses on creating a digital archive system in support of a digital portfolio application for faculty and students. SEASR will use data analytics to extract information from unstructured texts (such as raw textual data like websites) to produce semantic information that can be used to create meta-analyses of scholarly multimedia. From these meta-analyses, Humanistic Algorithms anticipates taking up questions such as: What are the components of scholarly multimedia? What is pedagogy in a networked world? How do we collaborate, train faculty, and teach students how to read and compose scholarly multimedia? HPC will allow Humanistic Algorithms the opportunity to isolate and adapt additional high-performance computing technologies that will aid in the development of the digital portfolio application. The mini-residencies will allow the group to experiment with new technologies and chart long-term goals.

The HistorySpace Group brings together humanities scholars experimenting with information rich virtual environments (IRVEs) that express combinations of textual, graphic, sonic and three- and four-dimensional forms of representation in order to collaborate on workflows, disciplinary conventions, protocols and tools that will move humanities scholars from print to virtual media production. HistorySpace, in conjunction with NCSA, is constructing an elaborate network of storyboards and workflow charts that will serve as the iterative, scenario-based design method that will structure the IRVE. This grant will allow HistorySpace to consult with high-performance computing specialists in order to refine their IRVE methodological structure, consider the integration and adaptation of additional high-performance computing tools, and begin construction of its first prototype IRVE.

About I-CHASS

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html