15. Cloud Computing in Social Sciences and Humanities

Using the cloud implies purchasing time on web based virtual computers or servers. The affordability and accessibility of this level of computer power stands to revolutionize Computational Social Science and Humanities. Increasingly we live in a quantitative world. The ability to read, store, and manipulate larger and larger amounts of data is becoming a prerequisite to be on the cutting edge of research. Econometric methods utilizing big data and high performance computing may shed a new perspective on existing beliefs or unsolved puzzles in Social Sciences and Humanities. In this chapter, some of the rapidly expanding cloud computing options available to the researcher are explored. Vendors vary with respect to costs and accessibility, operating systems, and available software. Microsoft Cloud Solutions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Google Cloud, to name a few, are household names which now provide cloud computing solutions. These solutions are modular services which allow the user to create the environment best suited to their needs and applications, whether that is websites, storage, or complex computational applications. Furthermore, household names in research such as Matlab have partnered with existing cloud solutions such as Amazon so that these familiar applications can easily be scaled up to analyze huge data sets. At the other end of the spectrum, some cloud solution providers provide only barebones Linux, OS X, or Windows operating systems and the researcher is given the opportunity to construct the environment which specifically meets their needs. Included are brief instructions to set up a high performance computing environment using Amazon and freely available Open Source applications such as Open Message Passing Interface and R with R Studio Server. These instructions allow the researcher to build a high performance parallel computing environment with a minimum of time or expense.