Category: Research

Beyond Tradition
Unveiling the Uses of Supercomputing in Humanities. 

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. 

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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.

This approach has ushered in a completely new era in Grundtvig research, according to Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig. She dismisses the criticism of digital humanities sceptics who argue that word embedding fails to consider the surrounding context of words. 

“This type of rejection is prevalent only among researchers who have not taken the time to understand or familiarize themselves with the current state and level of the research. When creating a word embedding, I obtain a vast mapping of a given word’s extensive association structure. Therefore, I can clearly discern different semantic focal points and contexts where the word appears in Grundtvig’s body of work. This is precisely what allows me to gain an overview.” 

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Head of the Grundtvig Center at Aarhus University

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig opted to form a research partnership with the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus University. Her best advice for other researchers going into supercomputing in the humanities is to team up with the right people.  

“Stepping into the world of supercomputing requires an approach to work processes that, in my opinion, represents a new trend in the humanities, namely, interdisciplinary collaborations and team-based publishing. Someone takes care of what is typically called the domain expert area – in this case, knowledge of Grundtvig’s authorship – while others handle the more technical aspects of execution.”

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Head of the Grundtvig Center at Aarhus University

She also emphasises the importance of comprehending the workings of the tools to better harness the power of supercomputing.  

“Even if you may not be able to train your algorithm yourself, it can be very practical to devote time and energy to obtain an operational understanding of the steps involved in creating a Grundtvig-artificial intelligence and the various types of applications such an intelligence can be used for.”

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Head of the Grundtvig Center at Aarhus University

With years of experience in using supercomputing in her research, Katrine plans to continue using it and encourages others to do so when it seems fit. Especially in times where humanities research is often dismissed as lacking scientific rigor, Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig sees an opportunity to make an impact.  With a keen sense of responsibility to bring her field forward, she is determined to prove that humanities research can be just as methodical and rigorous as research in any other discipline.  

“Researchers who have pioneering eagerness should explore supercomputing as it can give them a head start by venturing into “blue ocean” territory.” 

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig, Head of the Grundtvig Center at Aarhus University

Katrine Frøkjær Baunvig has used the DeiC Interactive HPC system for a range of NLP tasks such as linguistic normalisation of historical Danish, semantic representation learning and inference, and finally, historical chat bot development based on custom Large Language Model for Danish. 

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You have just read the first 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 second and third case featuring Iza Romanowska and Rebekah Baglini representing their fields of archaeology and linguistics .

Though supercomputers form the key basis of his research, UCloud has been a valuable, complementary tool for Tobias and his colleagues and will most likely continue to be so in future work as well.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang works within the broader research field of theoretical particle physics. As part of the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP³-Origins) at University of Southern Denmark, his research more specifically concerns quantum field theory and quantum chromodynamics (QCD), i.a. how fundamental particles, protons and neutrons, interact with each other:

My research aims to provide high precision predictions based solely on the theory of the Standard Model – the best-known understanding of the interaction of fundamental (i.e. not containing ‘smaller constituents’) particles. This is done via very large-scale numerical simulations using the most powerful supercomputers around the world.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang, Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP³-Origins) at University of Southern Denmark

Experience and achievements

More traditional mathematical methods that can be written down with pen and paper do not apply for research on quantum chromodynamics. As such, Tobias’ research relies on a method called ‘Monte Carlo’ which is applied to compute statistical field theories of simple particle systems. Though this type of research is done using very large supercomputers, Tobias has recurrently applied UCloud for exploratory studies of smaller volumes of data:

When doing large scale simulations, we sometimes do it on something called ‘10,000 cores in parallel’, and clearly this is not something we can easily do on a resource like UCloud. But for the small exploratory studies, UCloud is a nice resource in the sense that it is available; you don’t have to sit here on a hot day and burn your laptop to death – you can send it to UCloud and run it there. I think this is kind of the point where I have used UCloud the most; for small exploratory studies and some of the projects that don’t need a huge amount of computer time but still a significant portion.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

Though UCloud has served as a supplemental rather than a key tool in Tobias’ work together with the CP³-Origins research centre, he describes it as a nice complement to other HPC resources:

“I don’t think UCloud will ever be the only resource we use. But this is also the design of it; UCloud 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, UCloud will definitely remain very useful.”

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

At one specific project done at SDU as a collaboration between CP³ and IMADA (Institute of Mathematics and Data Science) a few years back, the vast majority of samples were generated on UCloud, and a significant amount of data production and measurements were also carried out on there [1]. UCloud needs, however, to be considered a part of a whole, according to Tobias:

“It is not that one particular machine made it possible; we would otherwise have found another machine to run it on. But UCloud provided us with a nice set up where we could just use local resources without having to go through big grant applications to get computer time.”

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

Pros and cons

In terms of time optimization, UCloud has also been a game changer for Tobias:

One of the nice things about UCloud compared to other machines is the wall clock time: quite often, for larger clusters, depending on the cluster though, you are very much restricted by the queue policies. So, there are some clusters where you have a maximum run time of 4 hours, and if you happen to run a small job that is longer than this, then you can’t – you have to always tailor your job to fit exactly and to make the maximum use of it. On UCloud you have a 200-hour wall clock. This is very helpful as for a lot of these things that have to run sequentially, you might not need a huge resource, you just need to have a long enough time span to actually do it.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

Though UCloud slowed the work process down a bit in the beginning as everything had to be installed and set up, this downside was quickly resolved and overshadowed by the benefits: 

“Once you get used to it, you can kind of equalize the work process to what you would have on a cluster where everything is just readily installed.”

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

Despite pros and cons, Tobias describes UCloud as a flexible system:

The fact that UCloud is really just a virtual machine has both positive and negative sides. The positive side is that you are really free to do whatever you want to do; you can install everything and you don’t have any restrictions that you would have on larger clusters where you can’t easily install software, or you can’t install it into the parts where you want to install it. On larger clusters, you are typically limited by the compilers that are already there. So, from that point of view, UCloud, at least to me, seems like a more flexible system. The downside is that you have to install everything; you can’t just quickly run something, you kind of have to constantly install everything from scratch.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

Last but not least, Tobias stresses the interaction with the UCloud front office as a major benefit that has helped the research group significantly, especially compared to other clusters with a much longer response time:

One of the nice things with UCloud as a general system is that every time something didn’t work, we got a really quick email back. Any questions we raised were answered quickly, so it was never something that kept us stuck for weeks or months – typically things were resolved in a very timely time scale. And things that we actively suggested as nice features or things that we thought were missing on UCloud were likewise addressed.

Post.doc. Tobias Tsang

[1]  Della Morte, Jaeger, Sannino, Tsang and Ziegler, “One Flavour QCD as an analogue computer for SUSY”, PoS LATTICE2021 (2022) 225, https://doi.org/10.22323/1.396.0225