The Mobility and Digital Transformation Advisor of the Junta, José Luis Sanz Merino, participated in the Computational Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Conference in León, where he announced the integration of Scayle into this infrastructure, composed of a dozen Spanish research entities.
February 14, 2025
Castilla y León | Mobility and Digital Transformation Council
The Junta of Castilla y León takes another step to enhance the Scayle Supercomputing Center with its inclusion as a CLARIAH-ES node in Castilla y León, making it a point of contact for the Community at a European level for research in Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities.
The Mobility and Digital Transformation Advisor, José Luis Sanz Merino, who is also the president of the board of the Supercomputing Center, announced this designation at the Computational Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Conference held at the Sierra Pambley Foundation in León. «For the Junta of Castilla y León, the commitment to technology and innovation is fundamental in the policies that the Government of Alfonso Fernández Mañueco is implementing in the Community,» he stated.
Sanz Merino emphasized the importance of Scayle for this type of research. «The land where Spanish was born is now at the forefront of language technology and digital humanities.» The integration of Scayle into CLARIAH-ES «strengthens this tradition, ensuring that Spanish and other Peninsular languages play a key role in the digital age.»
Scayle joins as a key infrastructure in supercomputing and data processing for humanities and social sciences, providing access to advanced tools for research in linguistics, history, library science, and artificial intelligence. «The Supercomputing Center has the capacity to perform 7,000 trillion operations per second or to read 12,000 books the size of Don Quixote in just one second. The increase in its computing power has a unique purpose: to improve the competitiveness of companies, the efficiency of administration, and the lives of individuals,» Sanz Merino exemplified.
The Supercomputing Center
The Junta aims to continue promoting the Scayle Supercomputing Center through its own headquarters, which «will allow progress in the Community and strengthen it as a technological and modern reference in Spain and Europe.» The construction is expected to be completed this year.
The advisor also added that «the RedCAYLE infrastructure has been updated, multiplying the speed of connections up to 100 Gbps (gigabits per second), improving connectivity for universities, schools, and research centers.»
Scayle also boasts the Caléndula supercomputer, the second most powerful supercomputer in Spain, which will drive scientific research and the development of artificial intelligence in Castilla y León. Public-private collaboration is essential for this purpose.
CLARIAH-ES Network
CLARIAH-ES is a distributed digital research infrastructure made up of a multidisciplinary group of experts from twelve leading research institutions in Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities, Library Science, Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Language Technologies, Informatics, and High-Performance Computing. Its mission is to coordinate Spain’s participation in the European research infrastructure consortia CLARIN and DARIAH.
CLARIN and DARIAH, the main research infrastructures in Europe for digital research in Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, both have landmark status within the European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) in the area of social and cultural innovation.
CLARIN, the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, consists of 23 Member States. It includes centers that provide data, supercomputing, or specialized knowledge in language technology and supports the exchange, use, and sustainability of language data and tools for research in social sciences and humanities. One of CLARIN’s main objectives is to ensure that all digital language resources and tools in Europe, as well as those of participating countries, are accessible online through a common portal for interested academics.
DARIAH, the Digital Research Infrastructure for Arts and Humanities, aims to enhance research and teaching in the arts and humanities through digital means. Its efforts focus on promoting the production, preservation, and exchange of multimodal data, services, and artificial intelligence tools, ensuring their long-term accessibility and dissemination. DARIAH also provides teaching materials and training opportunities to develop digital research skills, supporting the diverse needs and practices of the arts and humanities community at a transnational and transdisciplinary level.
By coordinating Spain’s participation in CLARIN and DARIAH, CLARIAH-ES promotes the advancement of Spanish research in humanities, arts, and social sciences, as well as strategic positioning in international projects and programs, mainly within the European Research Area context. The administrative offices of the infrastructure are located at HiTZ, the Basque Center for Language Technology (UPV/EHU).