About the laboratory
IPPRI/UNESP computing infrastructure for the Digital Humanities.
What it is
The IPPRI/UNESP Multi-user Laboratory is a space dedicated to research and collaboration among Humanities scholars, with a focus on Public Policy and International Relations. Its purpose is to develop and intensify the use of digital technologies in the human and social sciences, guided by the principles of e-Science and Open Science.
The laboratory provides high-performance computing infrastructure — CPU and GPU processing capacity, scalable network storage, and analysis and visualization environments — to collect, process, analyze and visualize large volumes of textual, audiovisual and social-media data.
The project
The infrastructure is supported by the EMU project — “Acquisition of redundant, high-performance (CPU and GPU) equipment with scalable storage for the Digital Humanities”, funded by FAPESP under the São Paulo State Research Infrastructure Support Program (EMU-PMP 2023 Call, Proc. 2024/03051-0).
Principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Marcelo Passini Mariano (UNESP).
Goals
The overall goal is to build a reference computing center for the needs and challenges of the Humanities. Specific goals include:
- Access — meet the growing demand from researchers and broaden collaboration with public and private institutions.
- Data dissemination and openness — expand public access to indexed databases and build a public data repository.
- Research — ensure computing power for data collection, processing, indexing and analysis.
- Integrated research tooling — continuous aggregation and search platforms (Open Semantic Search, OpenSearch).
- Datalake — scalable and secure storage of structured and unstructured data.
- Generative AI — enable the infrastructure to train open-source large language models.
Where we are
The laboratory is based in São Paulo, at Praça da Sé, with on-site and remote access — essential for serving the UNESP community across the state of São Paulo and researchers from other regions.