Case Study: University of Amsterdam advances political emotion research with SURF Computing Cluster

University of Amsterdam - Customer Case Study

The University of Amsterdam's research under Gijs Schumacher sought to analyze the role of emotions in voter behavior and political strategy by processing millions of political speeches and running complex simulations. The challenge was the immense amount of data and the significant computing power required for millions of complex simulations and advanced text analyses, which was beyond the capacity of a standard laptop. To meet this need, they utilized the SURF Computing Cluster.

SURF provided the high-performance computing solution necessary to run these intensive workloads. By using SURF's infrastructure, the researcher efficiently ran agent-based models involving millions of simulations, a task that would have been infeasible otherwise. A key result was the finding that political parties best represent their voters by taking the centre of their voters' views. Furthermore, a text analysis of parliamentary speeches that would take a week on a laptop was completed on the SURF cluster within an hour, dramatically accelerating the research.

University of Amsterdam

Gijs Schumacher

Associate Professor of Political Science