Sr. System Engineer
Jason Wells, MDY, works at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences' Research Computing group (FASRC) as a Senior Research Computing Systems Engineer. He helps to build, maintain, and help other's use Harvard's supercomputer, Cannon. He is widely published and has presented on many HPC topics at a variety of conferences around the world. Jason has been involved in the design and implementation of 4 supercomputers, including one TOP50 supercomputer.
Jason is one of the founders of the HPC Sustainability Initiative (https://hpcsustainability.org/), a project between Harvard and Cornell (we are happy to expand!) which is focused on advocating against and patching any holes in the efforts to make HPC more sustainable. Our first major project is an estimate of the greenhouse gas output on HPC systems worldwide. We are also arranging for two post-docs to work in the HPC Sustainability area, and an economics paper to serve as the bedrock for HPC Sustainability. Jason has and is not afraid of doing the legwork for a good cause.
In addition to the HPC Sustainability Initiative, Jason has been a member of Harvard's Research and Data Community's Steering Council, the CarCC steering committees for the Systems Facing and Emerging Centers tracts, worked extensively with XSEDE's Campus Resource Integration group, featured in media segments for XSEDE, served as an organizer and panelist for the ACI-REF Virtual Residency, and presented works at numerous conferences. Jason is a PEARC, ACCESS, and IEEE reviewer, Campus Champion, and is a member of CarCC, the EDUCAUSE Research Computing and Data Community, and the ACI-REF Virtual Residency. In addition to his undergraduate degree in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University, he also holds a graduate degree in Diplomacy from Norwich University.
Throughout these experiences, he has worked out of, and visited, many data centers over 25 years. One at Harvard, Four at Bentley University, one at Markely (world class data center in downtown Boston), one at MGHPCC, a LEED-certified green data center in Holyoke, and two at Oklahoma State University, which also has one for the National Weather Service. In addition to being familiar the many facets of a data center (cooling, power, racks, security, etc.), Jason has also handled much of the disaster recovery and business continuity planning for two of the data centers.