(... NLP and Computational Linguistics have become integral to Rebekah Baglini’s teaching, enabling her to offer students practical exposure to working with extensive datasets and large language models, fostering hands-on learning opportunities.

The potential of supercomputing in humanities becomes particularly evident when studying such societies with only limited data as experienced by archaeologists and historians. Iza Romanowska explains that the availability of data is limited in her field compared to other disciplines, stating that while social scientists studying more contemporary populations have access to abundant amounts of data such as the number of traders, transactions, and values, “we have none of this information.” Therefore, the use of HPC has been essential for her research.  

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, head of the Grundtvig Center at Aarhus University has used supercomputing as a methodological approach, and it has led her to non-trivial conclusions that significantly impact our understanding of of 19th-century nation builder and prominent pastor N.F.S. Grundtvig ‘s vast body of works and his immense influence on Danish culture.  In order to conduct a certain type of text mining, so-called word embeddings, she has created an artificial intelligence of Grundtvig, enabling a comprehensive analysis of his over 1000 works and 8 million words, resulting in unprecedented insights.

(... DeiC Interactive HPC) is not meant to be a huge machine, it is meant to be an available resource that is easy to use and that gives you a playground to set up things really from scratch where you can test things out and run smaller jobs and analyses. In that sense, it is quite complementary to a lot of the things we normally work with. For exploratory studies and for code testing, Interactive HPC will definitely remain very useful.

DeiC Interactive HPC is not just an ideal platform for the individual researcher who wants interactive access to HPC resources or an easy way to collaborate with national or international partners. It is also highly suitable for teaching. Jennifer Bartell and Samuele Soraggi, who are both working on the project National Health Data Science Sandbox for Training and Research, share their experiences with using Interactive HPC.

UCloud played a key role for Phillip when working on his master’s thesis, especially in the initial phase when he needed to interpret the performance of his predictive models. Optimizing and fine-tuning the so-called parameters of algorithmic models, especially when working with a lot of data, usually involves heavy amounts of computational power. Without UCloud, this process would have taken much longer.

Earlier research had managed to manually identify where 278 notes had been reused in Andersen’s published work, but this had been a time-consuming effort, taking many months of work. (...) Using the Python application on UCloud, this method (NLP) generated a number of tables, which indicated how similar a specific note is to a specific fairytale. “It only took me around 8 hours to generate these tables and find a good indication of where all the 861 digitalized notes had been reused (...)

UCloud has been a game changer for Assistant Professor (...) Ross Deans Kristensen-McLachlan, teaching within the crossroads of cultural studies and data science. In short, the benefits of UCloud within teaching narrows down to a much more trouble-free teaching process free of unnecessary technical issues, allowing teachers as well as students to focus on the substance of their work.

Researchers within the field of humanities are typically not heavy users of HPC or cloud computing. However, a book, once digitalized, is actually quite a big data set. Assistant Professor (...) Zhiru Sun, tells us how she has been helping researchers from the Faculty of Humanities at SDU solve research problems through digital methods and how using computing resources such as DeiC Interactive HPC, can be a highly viable option if your project e.g. involves looking for patterns and similarities in digitalized texts.

Professor Oliver Baumann from the Department of Business & Management at SDU tells us how he uses supercomputing for his research and gives us his take on how researchers from social sciences, who are beginning to reach a limit with their own computers, can benefit from (...) DeiC Interactive HPC.