About

Who we are

DHInfra.at is a CLARIAH-AT initiative developing shared infrastructure for digitally supported research in the humanities — bridging cultural-heritage digitization, research workflows, specialized software, and HPC/ML for large datasets.

What we are

A close community

We know our users and stay in direct contact — our developers work alongside the people using the infrastructure.

DH-first

Digital Humanities have priority here. No systematic disadvantage behind large STEM jobs on generic HPC.

Service-oriented

We try to outperform generic HPC for DH needs, with interactive and API access, not batch-only.

Shared in kind

Partners pool hosting, power and compute and share capacity fairly, with no usage fees at the point of use today.

Privacy-respecting

We do not expose, sell, or train models on your data.

Federated

A single point of entry and helpdesk, a catalogue of services, and shared workflows and documentation.

What we are not

Not a cloud provider

We offer cloud-like services, but not a fully streamlined commercial cloud experience.

Not a long-term repository

We do not host research data for the long term. We support short and mid-term project storage and integration with existing repositories such as ARCHE, GAMS and Phaidra, and point you to good data-management practice.

Funding & context

See our governance for how the consortium is run, and the imprint for funding details.

CLARIAH-AT

DHInfra.at is part of CLARIAH-AT, responsible for the long-term integration and sustainability (Verstetigung) of digital research infrastructure in Austria.

BMBWF, 2023–2026

Funded under "(Digitale) Forschungsinfrastruktur" by the Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung. This is an infrastructure project, not a research-centred one.

Project timeline

How we got here

2023 — Forming the consortium

Working groups take shape, the consortium contract is signed, and shared governance principles are drafted together with CLARIAH-AT.

2024 — Requirements & preparation

Requirements engineering across institutions, training, and hardware and software research — including the groundwork for an EU-wide procurement.

2025 — Building the infrastructure

Open-source software investment, governance drafts, and the acquisition and setup of the clusters, with the first test cases. An early plan for distributed storage at one site was re-evaluated; we chose to invest where it helps projects most — short and mid-term project storage and compute, plus integration with established repositories — rather than building long-term archival storage ourselves.

2026 — Integration & launch

Translating further requirements into day-to-day operations, validated through workshops such as DHd2026, with regular public operations targeted for mid-2026 and a short follow-up phase through the end of the year.