Tina Declerck to Retire After Decades on the Cutting Edge

NERSC Systems Department Head Tina Declerck began working at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in 1997, and she still thinks it’s a fun place to work.

“I like the challenge of bringing in systems that are new,” said Declerck. “It’s fun keeping up with all the new things that are going on, and being one of the first people to get a particular technology to work on systems of our size.”

In her long career, she’s had many opportunities in those areas. Declerck has served NERSC in a variety of roles, seen nearly every facet of the organization, and ridden the waves of many years of HPC. But for her, the fun is about to take a different form: she plans to retire at the end of 2024.

Declerck grew up in Oregon and earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Oregon Institute of Technology, after which she entered the United States Air Force and spent four years serving as an officer. She got her start at Berkeley Lab working on the Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF), a computing cluster used for physics research, which at the time was a part of NERSC. (The PDSF shut down in 2019.)

“Coming to NERSC was really, really fun,” said Declerck. “I learned so much – new programming languages and how to go about doing things, and I created a webpage for the site.” One legacy of her time and learning at the PDSF was its scheduling interface: when she arrived, the system lacked a way to let users know which systems were up and running and available for use at any given time. She created one so that users could check the status of a system before submitting a job.

But the real excitement was yet to come: When the PDSF split off to join the Berkeley Lab Physical Sciences Area, Declerck stayed with NERSC, her first experience with supercomputing. And though she took a brief hiatus to work in industry, she returned in 2007 and has been deeply embedded ever since.

The Challenge is the Fun

For Declerck, the challenge of HPC – the scale of it, all the things that might go wrong, the thrill of success when it works – is what makes it great.

“People don’t really understand how much difference it makes running things at scale,” she said. “There are so many times where you have something, you test it on the test system, put it on the big system, and then all hell breaks loose. That is, for me, what it is: the technology is super interesting. It's a lot of work, but also a lot of fun to be on the cutting edge.”

In recent years, Declerck has led the Systems department at NERSC, overseeing the process of procuring, installing, and maintaining the supercomputers and storage on the NERSC machine room floor, as well as the people who help make it all happen – but she still relishes the opportunity to get her hands on the tech: “It’s very exciting any time I get to log in to go check something,” she said. “I’ll find an excuse to do that.”

A Time of Transition

Although Declerck has seen NERSC through a lot, she also says now is a particularly interesting time in HPC, as the industry grapples with the end of Moore’s Law and seeks ways to improve compute power hand-in-hand with efficiency. And working in HPC is a great way to get a front-row seat to the big technologies of the future.

“It's an interesting transition time,” she said. “Usually when you get to this sort of time, somebody will come up with some magical thing – whether that’s quantum computing or AI or whatever. I think there will be a breakthrough in technology somewhere that's going to change how we look at computing. I’m looking forward to that – it’s going to be really interesting to watch.”

In particular, she says that several technologies are likely to lower the barriers of time, cost, and effort for many types of research, allowing scientists to fill in data and use digital models more accurately than is currently possible.

“It's been really fun seeing how AI is changing how we do science – I think it's giving us a lot more ability to try things without having to spend as much energy or effort. You don't necessarily have to have all the data; you can run experiments and see how things are going to work,” she said. “Things like digital twins, where you’re able to essentially run on the computer something that would have to be done in hardware, now you can try lots of different options without having to actually go buy all this stuff and try it. I think that those trends in how we are able to look at things and do things differently is going to be exciting.”

Many of the technologies Declerck sees on the rise are new, but others are coming back around, spiraling their way from being a good idea to something feasible. “It's a big circle. You'll see a lot of things that we used to do kind of go away, and then they come back, but more advanced, and some of it is that somebody's been trying to do something, and it's just finally that the technology has come around enough that you can actually do it now.”

Making Time

When she isn’t enhancing the quality of HPC for science, Declerck keeps busy. Very busy. “I have way too many hobbies,” she said. She weaves, spins, and knits; she keeps bees; she spends time with her dogs. She scuba dives and has been to the Galapagos three times. She climbs and recently went to Italy to check out the via ferratas – climbing routes incorporating metal brackets secured to the face of the rock – in the Dolomites.

After 27 years in the NERSC orbit, Declerck says she still likes NERSC, from the challenge of the work and the thrill of being on the cutting edge to the relationships she’s formed along the way. But maybe most of all, she likes what NERSC is making possible.

“I think it's a really fun, exciting place to work,” she said. “I love all the smart people. I love hearing about the science that is happening on the systems, and I like being part of solutions to a lot of the world's problems. Whenever I bring in somebody for interviews, I try to make sure that those kinds of things get brought up in the conversation, because that, to me, is the exciting part of working here. We help save the world.”