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Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud

9000 users on DeiC Interactive HPC

DeiC Interactive HPC has achieved another remarkable feat: it now has more than 9000 users! The graph shows the rapid and steady growth of the user base, which has tripled in just two years. More about this new milestone here

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Interactive HPC Quantum computing Supercomputing UCloud

DeiC Interactive HPC offers integration of advanced Quantum Computing Applications

Recently two advanced quantum computing applications were deployed on DeiC Interactive HPC: the NVIDIA CUDA Quantum Platform and the NVIDIA cuQuantum Appliance.

These applications show the continuous commitment to offer cutting-edge technologies to the Interactive HPC users.

“With these new applications, DeiC Interactive HPC is at the forefront of bringing quantum computing into practical, real-world use,” says Emiliano Molinaro, leader of research support at the SDU eScience Center. “The platform is now uniquely equipped to support the development of quantum algorithms and simulations, offering unprecedented level of computational power and flexibility.”

We hope that DeiC Interactive HPC’s deployment of these NVIDIA applications will be useful for a wide array of users, from academic researchers to industry professionals, seeking to explore the uncharted territories of quantum computing. It represents not only an enhancement of DeiC Interactive HPC’s offerings but also a significant contribution to the Danish quantum computing ecosystem.

Check out the full story on the SDU eScience website.

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Conference DeiC Event HPC Interactive HPC Supercomputing Teaching UCloud

Video use case: DeiC Interactive strengthens teaching in digital methods

Historian Adela Subotkova teaches history students at the University of Aarhus in digital methods. For her, DeiC Interactive has become an essential tool that has significantly facilitated and improved teaching.

Visit deic.dk to view video use case from the 2023 DeiC Conference

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DeiC HPC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud UCloud status

Another milestone – 8000 users on DeiC Interactive HPC

Interactive HPC hits another milestone: There are now more than 8000 users! This is an increase of 1000 users during less than 3 months!

The activity on the platform has been sky-high during the past few weeks – possibly amplified by the many researchers who praised the platform and inspired others at the DeiC conference on the 7-8th of November.

Check out the story and read more about why the platform is so succesful at SDU eScience.

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Conference DeiC Event HPC Interactive HPC Research Supercomputing UCloud

Video use case: HPC enlightens researchers in social sciences and humanities about human behavior

Sociologist Rolf Lyneborg Lund has trained an image AI using DeiCInteractive, which can help us understand how people perceive the concepts of “good” and “bad” neighbourhoods.

Visit deic.dk to view video use case from the 2023 DeiC Conference

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HPC Interactive HPC Research Supercomputing

State-of-the-art GPUs for AI available through DeiC Interactive HPC

AI companies around the world are scrambling to get their hands on the latest and most powerful NVIDIA GPU called H100. The biggest costumers include OpenAI, Microsoft and Google. Now, 16 NVIDIA H100 GPUs have landed at SDU, ready to be integrated into the DeiC Interactive HPC system. With the arrival of 4 servers with 4 H100 GPUs each at SDU, Danish researchers will be able to access the same hardware coveted by some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

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Image: NVIDIA Hopper H100 GPU. Credit: NVIDIA

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DeiC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud

Supercomputing for computational linguistics and (social) media data

Supercomputing has long been associated with areas such as physics, engineering, and data science. However, researchers in humanities at Aarhus University are increasingly turning to supercomputing allowing them to delve into unexplored territories and discover new insights.
From analysing historical archives to simulating ancient civilizations to analysing social media data, supercomputing offers unique opportunities to generate insights and advance knowledge in humanities.

In this article series, we highlight three cases with humanities researchers from Aarhus University that illustrate the varied ways in which supercomputing is being used in humanities research.


While many studies are based on historical data, the research of Rebekah Baglini, Associate Professor in Linguistics at Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University is an excellent example of supercomputing applied to recent data in the humanities.   

She employs supercomputing in her current projects involving the collection, processing, and annotation of large-scale media data from traditional and social media sources. By examining this diverse range of data, Rebekah Baglini investigates causal inference and causal reasoning from a linguistic perspective. Her research involves the application of semantic model theory and computational methods to uncover insights in linguistics.

“I aim to develop computationally assisted methods to identify trends in the discursive and informational landscape around topics concerning media dynamics, public health and science communication, crisis and risk messaging, as well as the emergence of mis- and dis-information”. 

Rebekah Baglini, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Aarhus University

In addition to her linguistic investigations, Rebekah Baglini also strives to enhance the existing computational language models for multilingual natural language processing (NLP), with a particular focus on under-resourced languages.   

Humanities researchers should know the affordances of High-Performance Computing  

Rebekah’s pursuits demonstrate the continuous progress of digital humanities and the ongoing efforts to enhance existing language models, ultimately leading to a deeper understanding in the field of humanities.   

“My earlier work involved smaller language corpora and didn’t require HPC resources. However, as my projects grew in scale, involving large corpus creation, the relevance of supercomputing increased. I recognise that not all projects require HPC. However, it is useful for researchers to gain training in the affordances of HPC, parallel compute, and large models so they know what’s possible, and can potentially take on projects of larger scale or make use of state-of-the-art resources for data processing, modelling, and simulation.”  

Rebekah Baglini, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Aarhus University

This explains why 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. She emphasises that there is a significant learning curve when delving into the realm of supercomputing. 

“There has definitely been a learning curve involved in the transition from locally maintained clusters to the cloud based Interactive HPC platform, particularly because it is also a somewhat new service without comprehensive documentation, and my affiliation with Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University has been a valuable resource as there is a great deal of collective experience and knowledge to draw on in the community”.  

Rebekah Baglini, Associate Professor in Linguistics, Aarhus University

Rebekah has used the DeiC Interactive HPC system for storing and analysing news and social media in the national research project HOPE that monitored Scandinavian user behaviour during Covid-19.

Today she uses the system in her own AUFF Starting Grant Project CROSS: Causal Reasoning and Online Science Scepticism to train language models to identify and analyse emerging narratives that undermine or counteract verified messaging on scientific findings and public health recommendations.


You have just read the third and final case in our series on Interactive HPC usage in humanities.
Through these compelling cases it becomes evident that supercomputing in humanities research is transforming traditional approaches, empowering researchers to uncover new insights and deepen our understanding of the field.  It opens doors to interdisciplinary collaborations and expands the possibilities for data analysis and modelling, ultimately shaping the future of digital humanities. 

Check out the other two cases featuring Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig and the case of creating a Grundtvig-artificial intelligence using HPC and Iza Romanowska and the case of Utilizing agent-based models in archaeological data.

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DeiC Interactive HPC Supercomputing UCloud UCloud status

Interactive HPC reaches 7000 users

What an accomplishment after less than 3 years of running the DeiC Interactive HPC service – there are now more than 7000 users on UCloud!

And not only that – we are seeing an increase in the number of active users per quarter.

Graph: the number of users on UCloud. UCloud has been used as the basis of the national HPC service, DeiC Interactive HPC, since November 2020. DeiC Interactive HPC is provided by a consortium of universities consisting of Aalborg University, Aarhus University and the University of Southern Denmark.

With so many users, we are also experiencing an extremely high utilization of the service. Over the last 6 months the average utilization was above 85%, with a peak utilization during working hours of more than 170 % of the total national capacity. 

“The DeiC Interactive HPC has been an incredible success among Danish researchers and students, to the extent that it is now one of the most popular HPC services in Europe, despite being a relatively small infrastructure. This innovative DeiC service has succeeded in democratizing HPC among all research disciplines, including humanities and social sciences. It has also been a very popular platform for teachers at universities, who now use it every year as part of their courses.”

Director of the SDU eScience Center, Prof. Claudio Pica.

“The surge in demand is a testament to the growing importance of interactive HPC in the national research ecosystem. It’s not just about capacity, but about making high-performance computing accessible and relevant to every field of study.”

Professor Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, head of Center for Humanities Computing, Aarhus University

“We are incredibly proud of DeiC interactive HPC’s success and we are excited for the future possibilities and perspectives.”

Lars Sørensen, Head of Digitalization, Aalborg University

This year, new hardware will be added to the service to accommodate the growing interest for GPU computing, which are highly requested amongst the DeiC Interactive HPC users. The new machines, which will be added both to the AAU and SDU datacenters, include compute nodes with 4 NVIDIA H100. This will have a significant impact on advancing research in Denmark.

This update was originally posted by the SDU eScience Center.

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DeiC HPC Interactive HPC Research Supercomputing Uncategorized

Utilizing agent-based models in archaeological data   

Supercomputing has long been associated with areas such as physics, engineering, and data science. However, researchers in humanities at Aarhus University are increasingly turning to supercomputing allowing them to delve into unexplored territories and discover new insights.
From analysing historical archives to simulating ancient civilizations to analysing social media data, supercomputing offers unique opportunities to generate insights and advance knowledge in humanities.

In this article series, we highlight three cases with humanities researchers from Aarhus University that illustrate the varied ways in which supercomputing is being used in humanities research.


Iza Romanowska is assistant professor at Aarhus University working at the Aarhus Insitute of Advanced Studies where she studies complex ancient societies.

To overcome the challenges of limited data from these ancient societies, researchers have started utilizing Agent-based model (ABM) sometimes enabled by supercomputing. ABMs are computational models that simulate the behaviour and interactions of individual entities, known as agents, within a specified environment or system. Each agent in the model is typically programmed with a set of rules or algorithms that control its behaviour, decision-making processes, and interactions with other agents and the environment.

ABM is a valuable tool in archaeology that allows us to simulate and analyse the behaviours and interactions of individuals or groups in past societies, and the use of ABM allows comparison of the model against real archaeological data.

Assistant Professor Iza Romanowska

In one of Iza Romanowska’s studies, agent-based modelling (ABM) made it possible for her and her colleagues to explore the Roman economy in the context of long-distance trade, using ceramic tableware to understand the distribution patterns and buying strategies of traders in the Eastern Mediterranean between 200 BC and AD 300.  

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.  

ABM as methodological tool necessitates running the simulation many times, and by many, I mean eight hundred thousand times, and that is possible with a laptop… if one plans to be doing their Ph.D. for 500 years. Supercomputing is bigger, faster, better without any qualitative change in terms of the research.

Assistant Professor Iza Romanowska

Using a high-performance computer like the DeiC Interactive HPC system enhances the scalability and speed of ABMs, allowing researchers to gain deeper insights into the behavior and outcomes of complex systems. The DeiC Interactive HPC facility hosts out-of-the-box tools, like NetLogo, for working with ABM. Researchers can also use ABM frameworks for Python or R in one of the many development apps like JupyterLab or Coder.  

Supercomputing and coding as research tools advance humanities research 

While humanities data in general is plentiful and can be analysed effectively, Iza Romanowska finds that there is a gap in understanding the underlying processes that generate the observed patterns, resulting in underdeveloped explanatory frameworks. Her point is that the lack of formal tools for theory building and testing remains a major disciplinary issue. 

“Within humanities including archaeology and history, data analysis is well-established. However, there’s a kind of fundamental disciplinary problem with that we don’t have or use many computational tools for theory building and theory testing. Supercomputing as a tool for the humanities can contribute to fill this gap and strengthen theory building and ultimately it can advance the field of humanities research.”  

Assistant Professor Iza Romanowsk

Iza Romanowska believes that more people in humanities should learn to code to take advantage of the possibilities offered by their data. She suggests that supercomputing can be a natural progression from this. While many humanities researchers may not feel like they need supercomputing, perhaps they are simply not asking questions that could benefit from high-performance computing (HPC). 

I would especially encourage junior researchers in the humanities to embrace supercomputing. It never hurts to acquire a skill, and many of these tools are becoming so easily available that it’s almost a shame to not use them.


You have just read the second of three cases in our series on Interactive HPC usage in humanities.
Through these compelling cases it becomes evident that supercomputing in humanities research is transforming traditional approaches, empowering researchers to uncover new insights and deepen our understanding of the field.  It opens doors to interdisciplinary collaborations and expands the possibilities for data analysis and modelling, ultimately shaping the future of digital humanities. 

Stay tuned for our third case featuring Rebekah Baglini representing her field of linguistics and check out the first case featuring Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig and the case of creating a Grundtvig-artificial intelligence using HPC

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call HPC Research Supercomputing UCloud

Apply for HPC resources

Researchers at a Danish university have various options for gaining access to computing power at both Danish and international HPC facilities. Front office personnell, please inform your users that the fall call H1-2024 is now open for applications for access to the e-ressources.

Information about the call is found on DeiC’s website.