Outlook Magazine - Fall 2025

Garry McLeold/Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

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Supercomputing Heights El Capitan helps Norling ascend to AI role at AMD

hanks to the legendary Seymour Cray and his eponymous company, supercomput ing has deep roots in the Upper Midwest. Gina Norling (’00) is ensuring those roots continue to flourish as she manages teams that are engineering the fastest supercom puters on Earth. As senior engineering program manager for Hew lett Packard Enterprise, Norling oversaw the com plex work streams of more than a dozen engineering teams responsible for El Capitan — which took the crown as the world’s fastest computer when it went online in November 2024 — and its record-breaking predecessor, Frontier. Both computers operate at exascale, meaning they can perform more than a quintillion — that’s a 1 followed by 18 zeros — qua dratic equations calculated per second. Now, Norling heads the High Performance Com puting AI Center of Excellence for Advanced Micro Devices, better known as AMD, the firm that made the processors that power both El Capitan and Fron tier. In this role, she’s overseeing teams of compu tational physicists who are helping scientists from around the world make better use of supercomput ers for artificial intelligence. “It is a dynamic space right now,” she said of AI. “I feel like every day it’s been changing. It’s exciting,

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Outlook 2025