On April 21, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced something new: they would be teaming up with the U.S. Department of Energy to offer one million CPU hours on supercomputers at NERSC for use by researchers in the humanities. The effort is managed out of the NEH’s new Office of Digital Humanities, created recently to recognize the increasing importance of computing in what has traditionally been a very old-fashioned area of research. Read more at the the NEH Humanities High Performance Computing Resource page.

A Supercomputer Takes Humanities Scholars Into the 21st Century

From an article by Josh Fischman in the April 22, 2008 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The phrase “one million” in grant announcements tends to be eye-catching because it is usually linked to the word “dollars.” But late Monday afternoon, when officials at the National Endowment for the Humanities used that figure in describing a new grants program, they were not talking about money.

“We are offering one million hours of high-performance computing,” said Brett Bobley, director of the endowment’s new Office of Digital Humanities….
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