The National Endowment for the Humanities' Office of Digital Humanities has announced the Humanities High Performance Computing Initiative.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement:
As you may have seen in today's Chronicle of Higher Education, the NEH has just announced our new Humanities High Performance Computing initiative—HHPC for short. Our goal is to start a conversation about how high performance computers—supercomputers—can be used for humanities research. We are working with colleagues at the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation to provide you with information on how high performance/grid computing and data storage might be used for work in the humanities. We are also announcing a new grant competition with DOE to award time and training on their machines. I urge you to check out our HHPC Resources page for more information.
Here's an excerpt from the Humanities High Performance Computing Resource page:
So what do we mean by "HHPC?" Humanities High-Performance Computing (HHPC) refers to the use of high-performance machines for humanities and social science projects. Currently, only a small number of humanities scholars are taking advantage of high-performance computing. But just as the sciences have, over time, begun to tap the enormous potential of HPC, the humanities are beginning to as well. Humanities scholars often deal with large sets of unstructured data. This might take the form of historical newspapers, books, election data, archaeological fragments, audio or video contents, or a host of others. HHPC offers the humanist opportunities to sort through, mine, and better understand and visualize this data.