Minisymposium Presentation

ODISSEI’s advanced scientific computing infrastructure demonstrates how high-performance computing (HPC) can transform social science research. By leveraging a national supercomputer, ODISSEI provides social scientists with a secure, powerful HPC environment to process massive longitudinal datasets and complex data linkages. Researchers can now apply complex models and simulations to sensitive and high resolution data—such as large-scale network analysis, agent-based modeling, and deep neural networks—thanks to ample memory, massive parallelism, and specialized hardware (GPUs) that accelerate computation. HPC yields significant computational efficiencies: tasks that once took months can run in a matter of days, greatly accelerating the research workflow and iterative discovery. ODISSEI’s infrastructure is highly scalable, accommodating the ever-growing volume and complexity of datasets, drawn from administrative, experimental and web sources, while maintaining performance. Equally important, this integration of cutting-edge computing within social science fosters interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers, data providers, and computer scientists. Notably, the combination of extensive, well-annotated social science datasets with supercomputing capabilities that ODISSEI offers is unprecedented, positioning it at the forefront of data-intensive social research. In this presentation I provide a number of use cases where exceptionally rich data sources have led to new, innovative, and novel research lines.