Outlook Magazine - Fall 2025

but it’s also mind-spinning for me as well.” At UW-Stout, Norling delved into mathemat ics and computer science while pursuing her applied mathematics degree. As a first-gen eration college student, Norling said the uni versity made her feel at home, and the faculty exposed her to higher math, programming and logic. Two internships — one at a biomedical com pany, the other at a defense contractor — fur ther stoked her curiosity. “You’re still quite theoretical in college, but having those intern ships and a senior project was really helpful in driving home how varied these applications for math and computing are in real life,” she said. After graduating from UW-Stout, Norling spent a decade working as a software engineer at Lockheed Martin in the Twin Cities before joining Cray Inc. It was at Cray — now a sub sidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise — that she was “tapped on the shoulder” in 2018 and asked to become part of the CORAL-2 pro gram, which was aimed at creating the first exascale computers. “CORAL-2” stands for Collaboration of Oak Ridge, Argonne and Lawrence Livermore – three of the national laboratories operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. Working with such national laboratories — whose his tory goes back to such scientific luminaries as Einstein and Oppenheimer — is a humbling experience, Norling said. Frontier, which went online in May 2022, can be found at Oak Ridge National Labora tory in Tennessee, while El Capitan is housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. While these supercomputers were being built, Norling managed 14 project work streams while also managing the cus tomers’ expectations. “We had so many engineering milestones that we needed to make sure that we hit, and that was my core responsibility,” she said. El Capitan is used primarily for classified sim ulations related to the U.S. nuclear program, while Frontier’s computational power is avail able for scientists in fields ranging from dis ease research to climate and weather science. “As the computational speed of these com puters gets larger, what we’re seeing is more refinement in our weather forecasting,” Nor ling said. “The number of parameters used in these calculations is absolutely humbling.”

In her new job at AMD, Norling leads a team of scientists who are working with national laboratories in Germany, France, Japan and elsewhere to develop their own supercomput ing capabilities. “The U.S. has had the leadership in exas cale (computing),” she said. “Now everybody else wants to have their own computational power.” Throughout her 25-year career, Norling has had the opportunity to hone the leadership skills she first developed at UW-Stout. “My leadership philosophy is always about empowering others and being the connector for others,” Norling 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.” Norling can trace her leadership approach back to her days at UW-Stout, where in addi tion to excelling in classwork and internships she served as captain of the dance team. “When you get people involved, we all win,” she said. “That principle holds whether you’re dancing at UW-Stout or whether you’re build ing exascale supercomputers for national lab oratories around the world.”

"My leadership philosophy is always about empowering others and being the connector for others..."

Gina Norling (’00)

18

University of Wisconsin-Stout