A Million CPU Hours Available from NCSA

4/30/2009

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Feb. 23 -- The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in collaboration with the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) will provide 1 million hours of time on NCSA's supercomputers to researchers who are pushing the boundaries of humanities, arts and social science knowledge discovery.

Applications are now being accepted at nucri.nu.edu/bluerain. The deadline for submission is 5 p.m. CST on Friday, March 13. Applicants will be notified by April 1, 2009. A complete description of the application process and required materials is available online at www.chass.uiuc.edu/Guidelines.html.

"The humanities, arts and social sciences are at the beginning of a new digital era. Data and visualization are at the heart of their activities, whether it is a collection of literature, creation of art objects, or analysis of census data," said NCSA Director Thom Dunning. "Supercomputing allows these researchers to focus on the most important problems in their fields without limiting the scope of their work."

Any humanities, arts, and social science scholar or collaborative research group (provided the group includes at least one University of Illinois principal investigator or co-principal investigator) may apply for computing resources to advance their computationally intensive work. Supported activities could include:

 

  • Mining large textual datasets, morphological analysis, manipulations, and transformations.
  • Analysis of geographical information systems data, maps, etc.
  • Computationally demanding visualization, modeling, or pattern recognition and analysis.

Selected researchers will be given access NCSA's high-performance systems and allotments of 100,000 to 500,000 compute hours. Resources will be available from May 2009 to May 2010, with the opportunity for successful projects to apply for a one-year renewal.

Before submitting a proposal, applicants are encouraged to consult with I-CHASS staff on the scope of the project, the computational readiness of their data and software, the humanities, arts, and social science content, and other matters to ensure the appropriateness of the proposal. To discuss your project with I-CHASS staff, email chass [at] ncsa [dot] uiuc [dot] edu or call 217-333-4327.


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This story was published April 30, 2009.