Q&A with HPE’s Trish Damkroger, an HPCwire Person to Watch in 2023

By HPCwire Editorial Team

April 29, 2023

HPCwire 2023 Person to Watch Trish Damkroger is a long-time HPC enthusiast and seasoned exec hailing from a 17 year tenure at Lawrence Livermore Lab, followed by five years leading HPC strategy at Intel, before one year ago making the move to HPE (where she is Chief Product Officer and Senior Vice President, HPC, AI & Labs). Damkroger is actively engaged in all levels of HPC Community, and she’s a big supporter of student HPC programs, including the Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition (watch this clip of Trish sharing why she’s so passionate about mentorship and diversity here). And keep reading for Damkroger’s insights into HPC, AI, HPE’s exascale activities (Frontier Supercomputer deployed and two more 10^18+ systems on the way) and more!

Trish, congratulations on being named an HPCwire Person to Watch for the third time and congrats on joining HPE! Tell us about your role at HPE, your areas of responsibility. What is most challenging and most rewarding?

These are exciting times for our industry, and even more so for HPE. Since joining the company nearly a year ago, I have had the honor to be a part of a team that delivered incredible systems in supercomputing and AI. One of these includes a pinnacle moment in HPC – achieving the holy grail of building the first exascale system with Frontier for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

A big part of my job is to continue this momentum. My focus has been to drive an end-to-end product strategy for our growing solutions in supercomputing and mission-critical systems. As part of this, some recent developments, which we announced in November 2022, include the new HPE Cray supercomputers, which make exascale era technologies accessible to more enterprises by offering them in a smaller footprint, and at a lower price point.

We also made a strategic investment in acquiring TidalScale to combine its software-defined solutions with our portfolio of mission-critical offerings to expand scale-out compute and in-memory performance options for customers. I am excited for us to share more on these developments this year.

I have also been committed to building our team to expand our talent, which includes our deep focus on vertical-specific workloads that help our customers solve problems efficiently, whether it is drug discovery, weather forecasting, or automobile design. Since I have joined HPE, I have onboarded a diverse set of professionals, which includes a mix of engineering and computational science backgrounds, to offer our customers even more support from dedicated experts. This robust team will allow us to further optimize workloads and specific business or research needs for our customers.

What opportunities at the high-end of the market (HPC, AI, IoT, etc.) are you most excited about for HPE over the next 12-24 months.

Supercomputing will continue to be a critical technology to the scientific community, and we see it extending to broader commercial use cases. This will take the form of more hybrid cloud and as a-service models to enable more access, collaboration, and flexibility among global research communities.

There is also a massive opportunity to adopt supercomputing, which is foundational to AI, to tackle large-scale AI model development and training. We are seeing a lot of buzz around generative AI and applications it is enabling, like ChatGPT. We believe there will be more workload-specific capabilities in AI to expand business use cases and fuel new applications leveraging large language models.

We already have customers, such as KAUST and Aleph Alpha, that are using our supercomputing and machine learning software solutions to build and train large language models to support a range of private and public sector use case needs.

How does HPE’s leading position in exascale computing benefit the wider scientific and commercial computing community?

Exascale systems, like Frontier, and systems like LUMI that leverage exascale technology, will absolutely have a transformative impact on how science is conducted, whether for publicly funded research or research driven by commercial organizations.

Many national labs and research centers in the U.S. and globally have strong private/public partnerships where they extend supercomputing power to organizations that need to solve challenging problems. We see them continuing this effort, especially with exascale.

By bringing exascale computing to the commercial segment, businesses can accelerate their discovery, innovate faster, and bolster their competitiveness by modeling and simulating at a completely new, breakthrough level. We can expect to see more computational scientists converge AI techniques with their traditional simulations to improve resolutions, and ultimately, gain better insights.

Our vision is to bring exascale era technologies, which span compute, accelerated compute, software, storage and networking, to more people by delivering them in a smaller footprint or in an as-a-service model.

The traditional HPC market is undergoing substantial change, most notably blending in AI technologies – with quantum possibly on the horizon. Where do you see HPC headed? What trends – and in particular emerging trends – do you find most notable? Any areas you are concerned about, or identify as in need of more attention/investment?

I see supercomputing continuing to be the backbone to many engineering breakthroughs, just as we have seen, and will continue to see, across different phases of advancements in AI.

We also see other technologies that will complement supercomputing to create new approaches to harnessing insights, such as the development of more diverse architectures and accelerators to support various data requirements. These also include purpose-built accelerators for quantum.

With exascale infrastructure, we will be able to more efficiently support these new types of accelerators and even use it as an early bridge to testing and developing quantum applications.

Aside from the actual technology trends, I would like to see more women and diverse talent in our industry. In just the past couple of years, I have seen some great programs driving this initiative, and I would like to see it continue to grow to help foster an inclusive environment. This will be important as we work toward fueling the next-generation of HPC and AI workforce development among college students and people in their early career stage.

What inspired you to pursue a career in STEM and what advice would you give to young people wishing to follow in your footsteps?

My inspiration to become an engineer came from my father who is an electrical engineer. In my family, it was assumed you would go to college and the only acceptable major was engineering. Looking back, I am happy that expectations were very clear and the engineering degree has given me the foundation to do what I love: the combination of people, technology and business.

I did not enforce the engineering requirement on my two children yet they have both ended up pursuing computer science and mechanical engineering degrees. It probably does not hurt that both of their parents are engineers. And they have witnessed the careers we both have had with that foundation.

As for advice, we all have natural talents where some things come easier than others. I am a big believer in aligning with your natural talents and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone. I do believe much of my success is my willingness to take risk, persevere when things are hard and always have a growth mindset. Your career is a journey with many peaks and valleys. Understanding that there will be roadblocks, while keeping a positive mindset, to find a path through or around the roadblock, will ultimately lead you to a rewarding career.

Outside of the professional sphere, what can you tell us about yourself – unique hobbies, favorite places, etc.? Is there anything about you your colleagues might be surprised to learn?

If I could have multiple full-time jobs, one of them would be dedicating even more of my time to mentoring and coaching women. I would love to see more women gain confidence and leadership skills, especially in the HPC and AI industries that have traditionally been dominated by men.

This may not be a surprise to many of my colleagues and friends of mine within the HPC industry, but since my husband and I invested in a vineyard near our home in Oregon, we have been making it into a full-fledged winery. This was one of our projects that kept us busy when we were sheltering-in-place during the first year of Covid-19.

Damkroger is one of 12 HPCwire People to Watch for 2023. You can read the interviews with the other honorees at this link.

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