6.345/ HST.728 is a graduate-level course aimed at introducing students to the rapidly evolving field of speech recognition and spoken language processing. While the first half of the class covers concepts and computational techniques through traditional lectures, labs, and problem sets, without the need for advanced computing, the second half of the class comprises a typically much more computationally demanding final term project for which the teaching team turned to high performance computing resources at the MGHPCC.