The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) and the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville today announced that they are making available two million additional hours of supercomputing time to projects in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

This collaboration is an extension of a pilot program between I-CHASS and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in Urbana, Illinois, that recently saw the allocation of a total of one million CPU hours to a diverse group of projects at the leading-edge of humanities research.  Supported projects included work in music information retrieval, analysis of aggregated census data, and state-of-the-art economic modeling.

“At NICS, we are excited to be able to support the I-CHASS efforts with this contribution of computational resources,” said Phil Andrews, NICS Project Director.

This new donation by NICS will increase the available resource to three million hours of supercomputing time.

“I-CHASS is excited that supercomputing centers across the globe recognize the mutual beneficial synergies that the intersection of high-performance computing and the humanities, arts, and social science communities brings to knowledge discovery and scholarship,” said Kevin Franklin, executive director of I-CHASS.  “Easy access to this type of resource allows scholars to apply advanced computing to their work and explore new paradigms of research.”

Any humanities, arts, and social science scholar or collaborative research group may apply to this program for supercomputing resources to advance their computationally intensive work. Supported activities could include:

1. •mining large textual and image datasets, morphological analysis, manipulations, and transformations.
   

2. •    analysis of geographical information systems data, maps, etc.
   

3. •    computationally demanding visualization, modeling, or pattern recognition and analysis.
   

Selected researchers will be given access to NICS’s high-performance systems and allotments of up to 500,000 CPU hours. Resources will be available from January 2010 to December 2010, with the opportunity for successful projects to apply for a one-year renewal.

Applications can be submitted online at the I-CHASS website starting September 15, 2009; applications are due November 1, 2009 and applicants will be notified by December 1, 2009. A complete description of the application process and required materials is available online at: http://www.ichass.illinois.edu/Guidelines.html. 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@ncsa.uiuc.edu or call 217-244-1988.