Using High Performance Computing Resources for the Record and Analysis of Cultural Heritage Sites

Using High Performance Computing Resources for the Record and Analysis of Cultural Heritage Sites

The current impediment of processing and visualizing the data acquired in the field as well as the limits in the cultural heritage sector of accessing high performance computing facilities for the post processing of high resolution data, represent a real bottleneck (Forte et al., 2012). These obstacles exponentially affect the time of the acquisition campaigns and the quality of the final results.

Aims
1. Designing an infrastructure based on the remote use of High Performance Computing facilities. Cultural heritage experts will have the opportunity to process large datasets directly in the field. The development of such infrastructure will allow a) reducing time and resources used during the acquisition campaign, and b) producing more qualitative three-dimensional information to be employed for the analysis of monuments and archaeological sites.
2. Using High Performance Computing facilities to build and test a functional and robust workflow for the generation of 3D high-resolution data collected from different acquisition instruments and techniques.

Methods
We want to develop and test a workflow for archaeological fieldwork that will incorporate the possibility to calculate high resolution 3D models, while still in the field. In particular, this work will allow a remote connection between the computation resources available through the High Performance Computing center in Lund (Lunarc) and the operations of 3D acquisition performed in the frame of several national and international research projects. The connection by remote desktop between laptop computers and Lunarc facilities will create the conditions for experts to post-process the information resulted from an intense data acquisition, directly in the field with very few computational restrictions. The system will be tested and customized at the department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Lund University using several 3D datasets acquired by the Digital Archaeology Laboratory (DARKLab) in previous acquisition campaigns. Afterwards, several experiments will be carried out in the frame of field research activities in order to define a best practice (a brief description of the projects where this system will be tested can be found in the paragraph: Test cases).

Research group

PI:Nicoló Dell’Unto
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University
Giacomo Landeschi
Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University
Anders Folin
Center for Scientific and Technical Computing, Lund University

Links and references