Relentless curiosity and lifelong learning fuels Alan Pippin’s tech validation career
Since the beginning, HPE has advanced the way people live and work by creating innovative technology at the heart of successful organizations and communities all over the world. We invite you inside our careers and culture through stories of the people who power HPE—our team members.
Silicon Validation Engineer, Alan Pippin, began his HPE career as an intern and rose through the technical ranks in our High-Performance Computing (HPC) team to deliver best-in-class computer chips to power customer products. His cumulative experiences and relentless curiosity power his efforts to test, identify design defects, and execute chips that improve our time to market and drive innovation faster.
Alan’s HPE career journey
For 20+ years, Alan built a career based on his passion for learning. He’s a strong believer that having the right people, working on the right technology, at the right time and place, can make anything possible. Working as an intern, he saw this first-hand working on the design team for microprocessors. He learned how to write logic design code to implement various architectural specifications for those processors. Next, he learned how to verify if the logic design was working as expected and 7 roles later, Alan is responsible for finding chip defects before fabricating designs to ensure higher-quality silicon chips for our HPE Cray EX supercomputing systems.
Alan also attributes the HPE culture as a key driver of his success. With each role he’s worked in, he’s had to step out of his comfort zone but felt motivated to do so by visionary leaders with roadmaps that change the way we live and work. His peers are his support system and he’s motivated to take calculated risks and do more because he sees them do it as well.
Team member straight talk
Q: What does a validation engineer do at HPE?
A: There is a demand in the market right now for High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms to help fuel the growth in AI and machine learning that will change the world. We can be at the forefront of meeting that demand with the technology and engineering we have in the next generation of Slingshot chips that are used throughout our HPC platforms today. As part of the Slingshot Silicon Validation team, I own and deliver tools, methodologies, and tests to help our teams identify chip defects before we fabricate our design to ensure higher-quality silicon chips for our HPE Cray EX supercomputing systems.
Q: How do you redefine what’s next in your career?
A: What’s next in my career involves learning even more about the next generation of Slingshot chips and partnering to find ways to test and deliver those chips with execution that improves our time to market over what we have done before. However, it isn’t the chips alone that will get us there. It’s the partnering of innovation across the entire platform, software, and services teams. This is what truly excites me the most. As all these pieces come together, as all these teams work together, we become one HPE where we will continue to design and deliver the best HPC platforms to meet our customers’ greatest demands now and into the future.
Q: What advice would you give to others interested in your field?
A: Be relentlessly curious and driven, constantly learning, finding innovative solutions to the tasks you are given, and challenging yourself to learn and grow. There are tough problems we face every day that need to be solved. We don’t have all the answers, so never be afraid to innovate and improve the way things are done to help find those needed solutions.
