Workshop Mission

High Performance Computing and the Humanities: A SHARCNET Workshop on Opportunities for Research

SHARCNET is organizing a workshop bringing together HPC specialists and digital humanists to develop a model for how HPC initiatives can support humanities research. We are interested in:

• What are the opportunities for the use of HPC facilities for humanities research?
• What examples are there of good practices and research innovation?
• What are the barriers to humanists using HPC facilities like SHARCNET and how can they be overcome?
• What concrete steps can SHARCNET (and by extension other HPC facilities) take to reach out to computing humanists and to then support their research?

To this end we are organizing a two day workshop of SHARCNET researchers and humanists at SHARCNET nodes to develop a agenda paper on HPC and the Humanities: Opportunities for Research. The agenda paper will propose concrete steps that can make HPC facilities accessible to appropriate research projects in the humanities both at SHARCNET and in the wider Canadian context of Compute Canada. We believe that there are opportunities for truly innovative research using HPC, Grid and Visualization techniques meaningfully in arts, literary, philosophical, historical and linguistic research.