Gina Norling, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Stout, is playing a significant role in the field of supercomputing. As senior engineering program manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, she managed teams responsible for building El Capitan and Frontier—currently ranked as the fastest and second-fastest supercomputers in the world, respectively. Both systems operate at exascale levels, capable of performing more than a quintillion calculations per second.
Norling now leads the High Performance Computing AI Center of Excellence at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), overseeing teams that assist scientists globally in leveraging supercomputers for artificial intelligence research. “It is a dynamic space right now,” Norling said about AI. “I feel like every day it’s been changing. It’s exciting, but it’s also mind-spinning for me as well.”
Her experience includes working on Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and managing multiple project streams during the development of both supercomputers. She highlighted her core responsibility: “We had so many engineering milestones that we needed to make sure that we hit, and that was my core responsibility.”
El Capitan is primarily used for classified simulations related to the U.S. nuclear program, while Frontier supports scientific research in areas such as disease study and climate science. According to Norling, advancements in computational speed have led to improvements in weather forecasting accuracy: “As the computational speed of these computers gets larger, what we’re seeing is more refinement in our weather forecasting,” she said. “The number of parameters used in these calculations is absolutely humbling.”
At AMD, Norling’s team collaborates with national laboratories worldwide—including those in Germany, France, and Japan—to develop their own supercomputing capabilities. She noted the global interest: “The U.S. has had the leadership in exascale (computing). Now everybody else wants to have their own computational power.”
Reflecting on her 25-year career since graduating from UW-Stout with an applied mathematics degree, Norling credits her leadership approach to experiences gained during college—including internships and extracurricular activities such as serving as captain of the dance team. “My leadership philosophy is always about empowering others and being the connector for others,” she said. “The way I do that is walking through what experiences folks want to have in their career and then finding assignments or potentials for them to have those experiences.” She added: “When you get people involved, we all win… That principle holds whether you’re dancing at UW-Stout or whether you’re building exascale supercomputers for national laboratories around the world.”
