About Us

Jones Research and Consulting supplements its permanent staff with contractor personnel. The flexibility of our contractor team allows us to leverage external expertise as specific problems are presented for solution. Key technical experts available to address challenging problems are listed below.

James Patton Jones

President & CEO, JRAC, Inc.
Co-Founder, Altair Grid Technologies, LLC
Founding Principal, Open4Definition.org
Executive Director, JoyfulBeing.org

An internationally recognized expert in HPC workload management, batch job scheduling, and Grid Computing, Mr. Jones has contributed chapters to four textbooks, authored six computer manuals, written 25+ technical articles/papers, and published several non-technical books. He served as co-architect of NASA's Metacenter (prototype Computational Grid) and co-architect of the Department of Defense MetaQueueing Grid, and assisted with the implementation of both projects.

Mr. Jones managed the business aspects of the Portable Batch System (PBS) team from 1997 thru 2000. (PBS is a flexible workload management, batch queuing, and job scheduling software system for computer clusters and supercomputers. See also www.pbspro.com.) Mr. Jones created the Veridian PBS Products Dept in 2000, and in 2003 spun-out the profitable business unit, co-founding Altair Grid Technologies, the PBS software development company. He then served in international and domestic business development roles, growing the global PBS customer base. In late 2005 Mr. Jones founded JRAC, Inc. in Newnan, Georgia, focusing on HPC IT consulting, and custom application development.

With over 20 years in the computer software industry, including eleven years experience in job scheduling and distributed workload management, Mr. Jones is experienced in technology communication and training, supercomputer administration, systems analysis and management, project design, management, and implementation, and is an accomplished C programmer and web application developer.

Mr. Jones has been applying his software development skills to websites and web applications intermittently since 1994, and as his primary professional focus since 2005. He finds his distributed-application and high-performance computing experience gives him an edge in developing powerful, scalable, data-intensive websites, while maintaining a highly responsive user experience.

When not developing software or conducting research, Mr. Jones enjoys international travel, gardening, hiking, camping, photography, genealogy, and writing.

Download James' C.V. and Resume in PDF format.

Judith Utley

Senior HPC Systems Analyst and Grid Expert

Ms. Utley is an information systems professional with 24 years experince in HPC systems analysis and administration, including 12 years with HPC and Linux cluster integration. Ms. Utley was co-lead for the NASA Metacenter project and contributed significantly to the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) project. Her background combines computer technical knowledge with the ability to evaluate a HPC environment and apply sound technical solutions to meet requirements. Her project management experience includes managing both local and distributed virtual technical teams, and planning and coordinating international workshops in grid technology management. Ms. Utley was instrumental in launching the commercial version of the Portable Batch System (PBS) in business planning, marketing, sales, and technical consulting working with both government and commercial customers.