About
I lead the Research Computing team at Northeastern University. Most of the job is making sure that several thousand researchers can get their work onto the High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster and get answers back out.
What I’m working on#
As Executive Director of Research Computing at Northeastern University, I’m responsible for the HPC cluster infrastructure, the policies that ensure fair resource allocations, and the Research Computing team supporting a community of more than 3,000 HPC users. In practice that means infrastructure planning and decisions at the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) for Northeastern University, working to ensure researchers get access to the resources, and guiding projects and building out training and outreach for the community so that the answer to “how do I use this” arrives before the support ticket rather than after it.
Recent work I care about: a full review of our research storage and the retention policies that go with it, automating the HPC account lifecycle, and standing up a secure enclave so researchers working with regulated data don’t have to invent their own compliance story from scratch.
How I got here#
I came to Research Computing from the user’s side of the ticket queue.
My PhD is in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania, where I spent eight years writing C++ and MPI code for spin-lattice dynamics (SLD) — the coupling between magnetic moments and atomic motion in materials, with an eye toward magnetic hyperthermia treatments for cancer treatements and heat-assisted magnetic recording. I wrote an implicit integrator for LAMMPS that cut energy and magnetization fluctuations by several orders of magnitude to increase the stability of long running calculations, and wrote LAMMPS code for angular momentum conservation under periodic boundary conditions for an accurate representation of the lattice and spin systems coupling.
The useful part of that wasn’t the physics. It was knowing what it feels like when a job dies at 2 a.m. for reasons that have nothing to do with your science, and when the documentation assumes you already know the thing you’re trying to look up. I joined Northeastern University as a Research Computing Facilitator in 2022, moved into the Computational Scientist role, and took over the Research Computing group in 2025.
Teaching runs through all of it. I was a teaching fellow and TA trainer at University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Teaching and Learning, and completing outreach work explaining computer simulation at Philly Materials Day. This carried over to Research Computing which is mostly teaching proper resource usage with a larger cluster attached.
Get in touch#
I’m glad to talk about Research Computing infrastructure, HPC program strategy, or containerizing scientific software. You can reach me at jycok1412@gmail.com or find me on GitHub and LinkedIn. My CV is here.
Last updated September 2026.