Trish Damkroger wasn’t looking to change jobs when she attended SC15 in Austin, Texas. Capping a 15-year career within Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories, she was acting Associate Director for Computation at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Her mission was to equip the lab’s scientists and research partners with resources that would advance their cutting-edge work in stockpile science and other critical fields.

But a chance conversation brought up the possibility of a career jump, and one thing led to another.

Today, Damkroger is Vice President of Intel’s Data Center Group and General Manager of its Technical Computing Initiative. Her work helps shape Intel’s high-performance computing (HPC) products and services for the technical market segment. Under that umbrella are the next-generation platform technologies and frameworks that will take Intel toward exascale and advance the convergence of traditional HPC, big data, and artificial intelligence workloads.

Along with her new job, Damkroger and her husband have moved to Oregon and joined the state’s $3.35 billion wine and grape industry. He recently retired, and she commutes to work from their 12-acre winery on Bald Peak, 20 miles or so south of Intel’s Hillsboro facilities. The two met at an executive coaching program run by the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

Damkroger is also a certified coach and a strong advocate for women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). She has played leadership roles in the industry’s annual Supercomputing Conference for more than a decade. She chaired SC14—the year of HPC Matters—as well as heading the SC15 Steering Committee, and leading the SC16 Diverse HPC Workforce Committee. She’s signed on as Vice Chair of SC18.

Trish, you’re very well known in the industry, but I wonder if you could tell us a bit about your background and career path. What were some of the steps that led you to where you are today?

My dad is an electrical engineer. I had an older brother and a younger brother, and when we were growing up, the expectation was always that we would go to college, we could go to any state school we wanted, and we could be any kind of engineer. Those were our choices.

Of course, I thought that was awful, but now, with my own kids, I sometimes think it would have been good to give them a little more clarity, a few more guard rails—one of them is in computer engineering, and the other is still figuring out his passion. In any case, I chose electrical engineering graduating from Cal Poly. My older brother is a computer engineer, and my younger brother is a mechanical engineer.

When I started out, I was fascinated by the Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman television shows. I wanted to do robotics, and create prostheses that connected to the brain, and make that whole thing work. But I was a little before my time, and the programs to do that really weren’t there.

After graduation, I worked full time at Hewlett-Packard and got my Master’s at Stanford studying AI and neural networks, which were in their infancy. That’s always been a passion for me—to figure out how the brain and body work together and how we can make prosthetics that mimic real limbs. It’s cool to see that coming to fruition now.

So you had worked at HP?  

Yes. I left HP to marry my husband, who lived in Livermore, California and I took a job with Sandia National Laboratories. I worked at Sandia for 10 years, and left there in 2000 to manage a product line for an IT service management company.

After 9/11, I wanted to return to the national security sector. I missed the labs and the national security mission. Plus the company I worked for was relocating and I was not interested in moving.

So I went to Lawrence Livermore, and I loved it, and I never expected to leave. I had worked my way up the organizational ladder and was probably in the last position I would have at the laboratory—and I realized I didn’t want to do what I was doing for another 10 years.

I came to Intel because it’s a chance to do something totally different. I love new challenges. I love to learn new things, and I have more chances to do that at Intel. It’s a completely different mindset and a completely new skillset to learn. I feel like I could spend decades here and continue to learn and grow.

Intel is in the middle of everything. It’s just a tremendously exciting place to be.

How did you make the move to Intel? Were you recruited? Were you job hunting?

Not job hunting at all. I ran into Debra Goldfarb [formerly of Microsoft and now Intel’s Senior Director of Market Intelligence] at SC15, and Deb asked if I was attending a women’s recruiting event Intel was putting on. I was already booked, and wasn’t looking to change jobs, so I didn’t attend. I made one of those, “If the right job comes up, keep me in mind” comments, but I wasn’t that serious—it was more in a spirit of not wanting to close doors.

Well, Deb set up a dinner meeting for me with Diane Bryant [president of the Intel Data Center Group], and I loved Diane. I mean, who doesn’t love Diane? We connected. She pointed out that I was passionate when I talked about all the things I was doing outside my job, with women and STEM, with SC. But, she said, “I don’t hear that same passion when you talk about your work.”

She was right, and it was a real “Wow” moment. It made me aware and got me thinking.

Has the Intel culture surprised you in any ways? Is it different from what you expected?

I’ll share a story. At Livermore, I had a beautiful office and my own conference room. On my first day at Intel, they walked me to my office, which is a small cube, and I asked, “Is this temporary?” But Intel being very egalitarian, they said, “No, everyone has a cube. BK—CEO Brian Krzanich—has a cube.”

I knew Intel was very egalitarian, and I think it’s a good thing. I like that philosophy. It’s a part of the culture going back to [Bob] Noyce and [Gordon] Moore. But the cube was a surprise.

People warned me about the pace. I’ve always worked hard and long hours, so that hasn’t changed, but being in a worldwide company is different. I have lots of early morning and evening calls. Intel’s business is truly global, and it’s 24/7. You’re dealing with China, with Europe—you have to be available. I knew about it intellectually, but it’s different when you’re actually doing the 6 am and 8 pm calls.

Another thing I love about Intel, and it’s huge, is how open everyone has been. They’ve been very welcoming, very willing to throw me in the middle of everything very quickly, and have the confidence in me that I can represent Intel all over the world. I love it. It shows the trust they have in their people.

You’re an advocate for diversity in STEM, and I know Intel is out front on this issue.  Why is diversity so important?

The real importance of diversity in HPC is that we need more people to go into tech fields. Period. Demand is growing, and we can’t meet it with only white men. The other point is that we’re selling to a diverse market. If we’re not engineering for that diversity, we’re going to lose. Everybody loses.

I’m very supportive of women in STEM. I’m continuing to push that, and to coach women who are in male-dominated fields.

You’ve focused industry attention on why HPC matters. Could you talk a bit about why sustained federal investments in HPC are so crucial?

My one-sentence answer is that HPC is absolutely essential to national competitiveness. China recognizes this. China expects to be at exascale in 2020. They’re getting there first because they’re making the investments. They’re developing indigenous technologies, and seeing HPC as a core element of competitiveness.

HPC is important because it is the way we are going to solve problems in every field. If we want the US to be at the forefront of innovation, we have to continue to invest. If we aren’t making those upstream investments to drive HPC innovation, we will lose our competitive edge.

That’s manufacturing and financial modeling and drug discovery. It’s autonomous driving and cognitive computing and bulletproof cyber security. It’s curing cancer, managing the electrical grid and safeguarding the nuclear arsenal. It’s sustainable agriculture and precision medicine.

Our digital infrastructure is just as important as our highways and airports. We need all hands on deck to help the government’s policymakers and funders understand HPC’s importance and why we need to push forward. We have to expand the capacity to support the nation’s critical science and technology research—DOE systems are at greater than 90 percent capacity, and that’s hard to keep up because you have to bring the systems down for maintenance.

We need to educate funders and decision makers about the ways government investment funds the full ecosystem—the labs and universities to build the large machines, conduct the research, do the applied math for the models, develop the applications and algorithms, explore the new technologies, and do all the things that will be in everyday computing environments 5-10 years out, and in your smart phone and wearables after that. If we stop those investments, the middle of the pyramid eventually collapses and the innovation stops. That’s an outcome no one wants.

About the Author

Jan Rowell writes about technology trends and impacts in HPC, healthcare, life sciences, and other industries.