Two of WestGrid’s computing nodes on Checkers were used last week by humanities researchers at the workshop “Mind the Gap: Bridging HPC and the Humanities," which took place May 10-14 at the University of Alberta. Over 20 graduate students, post doctorate fellows, and programmers took part in six research projects, covering a wide variety of issues that were best addressed using high performance computing (HPC).

“Participants found this workshop significant because it involved actually doing rather than just talking,” says Geoffrey Rockwell, workshop organizer and professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing at the University of Alberta. “There have been a number of events discussing opportunities for HPC and the humanities, but this was the first (for us) where we had the support to build prototypes and run them on the system.”

The projects covered a diverse range of topics aimed at solving various research practice challenges. One such project investigated how to link longitudinal census data so that people could be traced regardless of changes in name or location. Another project experimented with indexing and cloud computing to make analytics more efficient on the web. A third sought to enable researchers to sort through electronic databases with greater efficiency, saving time and energy in word-based searches.

This workshop was the first step of a seed project aimed at facilitating the advancement of a common research agenda for Humanities researchers across Canada, as well as to spark dialogue between researchers in the Humanities and researchers and staff associated with HPC at the University of Alberta.

“Everyone seemed to feel that this was a good paradigm for such workshops,” says Rockwell. “Some of the projects got quite far demonstrating that there are real problems in the humanities that can benefit from HPC and which use significant resources."

More information about the Mind the Gap workshop is available here. To read a blog post from one of the workshop attendees, click here. To see photos of the event, click here.