HPCwire 2023 People to Watch Trish Damkroger is a longtime HPC enthusiast, having worked at Lawrence Livermore Lab for 17 years and then at Intel where he led HPC strategy for 5 years before joining HPE (she is Chief Product Officer and Senior Vice President, HPC, AI & Labs). Damkroger is actively involved in her HPC community at all levels and is a big supporter of student HPC programs such as the Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition (explaining why Trish is passionate about mentorship and diversity). Check out this clip I’m sharing). Also, continue reading for her Damkroger insights on HPC, AI, HPE’s exascale her activity (frontier supercomputer deployment, plus two of her 10^18+ systems in progress), and more. please give me!
Trish, congratulations on being named HPCwire Person to Watch for the third time and joining HPE! What is your role and area of responsibility at HPE? What is the most challenging and most rewarding?
This is an exciting time for our industry, and even more so for HPE. Since joining the company almost a year ago, I have been honored to be part of the team that delivers amazing systems in supercomputing and AI. One of them contains HPC’s pinnacle moment. We achieved the Holy Grail of building the first exascale system with Frontier for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
A big part of my job is to keep this momentum going. My focus was to drive an end-to-end product strategy for growing solutions in supercomputing and mission-critical systems. As part of that, recent developments announced in November 2022 include the new HPE Cray supercomputer. This makes exascale-era technology accessible to more companies by offering it in a smaller footprint and at a lower price point.
We also made a strategic investment in the acquisition of TidalScale, combining TidalScale’s portfolio of software-defined solutions and mission-critical products to expand scale-out computing and in-memory performance options for our customers. We look forward to sharing more about these developments this year.
He is also committed to building teams to expand talent, with a focus on vertical-specific workloads that help customers efficiently solve their problems, such as drug discovery, weather forecasting, and automotive design. is. Since joining HPE, we have onboarded a diverse set of experts with a mix of engineering and computational science backgrounds to provide our customers with even more support from dedicated experts. This strong team allows us to further optimize your workload and your specific business or research needs.
At the high end of the market (HPC, AI, IoT, etc.), what are HPE’s most anticipated opportunities in the next 12-24 months?
We see supercomputing as an important technology for the scientific community and expanding into a wider range of commercial use cases. This takes the form of a more hybrid cloud and service model that allows greater access, collaboration and flexibility among the global research community.
There is also a huge opportunity to embrace the foundation of AI, supercomputing, to tackle the development and training of large-scale AI models. There’s been a lot of talk about generative AI and the applications it enables, like ChatGPT. We believe more workload-specific capabilities will be added to AI to expand business use cases and facilitate new applications that leverage large language models.
Customers like KAUST and Aleph Alpha use our supercomputing and machine learning software solutions to build and train large-scale language models to support the needs of a variety of private and public sector use cases. .
How does HPE’s leadership position in exascale computing benefit the broader scientific and commercial computing community?
Exascale systems like Frontier, and systems like LUMI that leverage exascale technology, will have a transformative impact on how science is done, whether publicly funded or commercial led. will give
Many national laboratories and research centers in the United States and around the world have strong public-private partnerships that bring supercomputing power to organizations that need to solve tough problems. Especially at exascale, we see them continuing this effort.
By bringing exascale computing to the commercial segment, companies can accelerate discovery, accelerate innovation, and gain a competitive edge by taking modeling and simulation to a whole new and groundbreaking level. We can expect more computational scientists to integrate his AI techniques into traditional simulations to improve resolution and ultimately yield better insights.
Our vision is to bring exascale-era technologies across compute, accelerated computing, software, storage and networking to more people by offering them in a smaller footprint or as-a-service model. is to
The traditional HPC market is undergoing significant changes, most notably the convergence of AI technologies. Where do you think HPC is headed? What trends, especially emerging ones, do you think deserve the most attention? Are there any specific areas?
I believe that supercomputing will continue to be the backbone of many engineering breakthroughs that we have seen, and will continue to see, at various stages of AI progress.
We also see other technologies complementing supercomputing to create new approaches to harnessing insights, such as developing more diverse architectures and accelerators to support different data requirements. These also include quantum-only accelerators.
With exascale infrastructure, we can more efficiently support these new types of accelerators and even use them as an early bridge to testing and developing quantum applications.
Aside from the actual tech trends, I hope to see more women and diverse talent in this industry. Over the last few years, I have seen some great programs driving this initiative. I hope that this initiative will continue to grow in order to promote an inclusive environment.It will be a great opportunity for the next generation of her HPC and AI workers among college students and those in the early stages of their careers. It is important in working to promote the development of power.
What inspired you to pursue a career in the STEM field? And what advice would you give to young people who want to follow in your footsteps?
What inspired me to become an engineer was my father, an electrical engineer. In my family, you were supposed to go to college and the only accepted major was engineering. Looking back, my expectations were very clear and I am happy that my engineering degree gave me the foundation to do what I love: a combination of people, technology and business. .
I didn’t force my two kids into engineering requirements, but they both ended up with degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering. Having both parents being engineers is probably not a bad thing. And they’ve seen the careers we both have built with that foundation.
When it comes to advice, we all have an innate ability to do some things easier than others. I am a strong believer in staying in tune with your natural talent and stepping out of your comfort zone. I believe a lot of my success comes from taking risks, being patient when things get tough, and having an ever-growing mindset.Your career is a journey with many ups and downs. Recognizing that there are obstacles while maintaining a positive mindset and finding a way through or around them will ultimately lead to a rewarding career.
Outside of work, what can you tell us about yourself? Unique hobbies, favorite places, etc. Is there anything about you that your colleagues might find surprising?
If I could have multiple full-time jobs, one of them would be devoted more time to mentoring and coaching women. We want more women to gain confidence and leadership skills, especially in the traditionally male-dominated HPC and AI industries.
This may come as no surprise to many of our colleagues and friends in the HPC industry, but ever since my husband and I invested in a vineyard near our home in Oregon, we’ve been building a full-fledged winery. I have continued. This is her one of the projects that kept us busy during the first year of Covid-19 when we were quarantined at home.
Damkroger is one of HPCwire’s 12 people to watch in 2023. You can read interviews with other winners at this link.
