FAS Research Computing

FAS Research Computing is a centralized research computing organization serving the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences community. It provides high-performance computing, data management, and consulting to researchers across sciences and humanities, aligning with institutional priorities set by Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Harvard Library. The unit interacts with multidisciplinary centers and laboratories across Cambridge and Boston.

Overview

FAS Research Computing operates within the administrative framework of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences and collaborates with Harvard University, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard Medical School, and external partners such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Broad Institute, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Northeastern University. Its mission reflects policies shaped by stakeholders including the Harvard Corporation, the Harvard Office of the Provost, and grant-making bodies like the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy, and private foundations such as the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The group supports researchers spanning units such as the Department of Physics, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Department of Economics, Department of Sociology, and area studies centers like the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Services and Infrastructure

FAS Research Computing maintains a portfolio of services including high-performance computing clusters, cloud provisioning, storage systems, and research data management, collaborating with entities such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and consortiums like Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center. Its infrastructure supports software environments for projects in computational chemistry linked to Schrödinger (software), genomics workflows used by teams at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School, and numerical simulation frameworks employed in collaborations with NASA, NOAA, and MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Storage and backup systems are coordinated with archival services found in the Harvard Library and data repositories aligned with standards from the Research Data Alliance, Digital Public Library of America, and discipline-specific archives such as GenBank and ImageNet. Security and compliance follow guidelines from Office for Civil Rights (United States), National Institute of Standards and Technology, and funding agency mandates exemplified by NIH Data Sharing Policy and NSF data management requirements.

Research Support and Collaboration

The organization provides consulting, code optimization, and reproducibility services to investigators in laboratories like the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the Wyss Institute, the Center for Brain Science, and departments including Statistics Department, Harvard University and Department of Mathematics. It partners on interdisciplinary grants with centers such as the Harvard Data Science Initiative, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Harvard & Smithsonian, and international collaborators including CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, and consortia like HPC Canada and PRACE. FAS Research Computing aids projects using tools and languages developed by communities such as Python (programming language), R (programming language), Julia (programming language), MPI, CUDA, and platforms like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Jupyter Notebook. It supports reproducible scholarship aligned with norms from the American Historical Association, Modern Language Association, Association for Computing Machinery, and standards promulgated by the Open Science Framework.

Training and Education

Training programs include workshops, bootcamps, and semester courses coordinated with academic units such as the Harvard Extension School, the Harvard Kennedy School, and professional development offerings at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Instruction covers topics from parallel programming exemplified by work at Argonne National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to domain-specific data analysis used in collaborations with Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts Eye and Ear. FAS Research Computing organizes seminars featuring speakers from institutions like Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Yale University, Columbia University, and industry partners including NVIDIA, Intel Corporation, and IBM. Pedagogical resources draw on curricular models from the Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry initiatives and align with credentialing by bodies such as the Computing Research Association.

Governance and Funding

Governance involves coordination among the Dean's office of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, administrative units like the Office of Technology Development, and oversight from committees including faculty advisory groups and representatives from centers like the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Funding streams combine institutional support from Harvard University allocations, research grants from agencies such as the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Energy, philanthropy from donors similar to the Harvard University Funds and corporate partnerships with vendors like Cisco Systems and Dell Technologies. Budgeting and strategic planning align with campus-wide initiatives such as sustainability efforts linked to the City of Cambridge and regional infrastructure planning with the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.

Category:Harvard University organizations