Tim Mattson
Senior Principal Research Scientist at Intel
Tim Mattson is an adamant kayaker and computer scientist born in Los Angeles, California. He has enjoyed a long and successful career working in high-performance computing and been heavily involved in almost every trend in supercomputing. However, he considers himself to be a physicist at heart.
A Mixture of Sciences
Tim studied chemistry at the undergraduate level with a huge interest in the wonders of medicine. However, three years in he became entranced by the recent revolution in quantum mechanics and soon he was hooked. He spent the next six years working tirelessly to be able to understand quantum mechanics to the degree that one can.
Upon entering grad school, he was determined to show the world that you could undertake the challenges of quantum physics without computers. He didn’t like using them; they felt contrary to a traditional physicist’s approach. Despite this rocky relationship with computing, he soon realised a naivety in dismissing them so quickly.
“You just couldn’t do anything with quantum mechanics without a computer. Whether I liked it or not, I was going to become a computer scientist.”
Turning the pages of Tim’s Ph.D., you would struggle to pin down in which discipline it belonged. Despite undertaking the work within a chemistry department, you would find physics, computer science, mathematics, and only some chemistry. Running the complex calculations required a deep dive into the low-level hardware of computers at the time, far more than the average computer scientist learns about hardware today.
“At the end, I didn’t know what I was!”
High-Performance Parallel Computing
He believes that much of our career is led serendipitously. The atmosphere at the time was such that applied computing became more and more exciting. It led him directly to a fruitful career in high-performance parallel computing.
Tim is now a Senior Principal Engineer at Intel Labs in parallel computing and carries out research at the intersection of mathematics and computer science. He believes that a research position for a large multinational is the best job in the computing industry, allowing him to try out new and “often dumb” ideas. He has been able to work alongside incredibly talented people and has experienced every trend in supercomputing as it came.
His background in physics has set his perspective throughout this career. Despite realising early on that he would make a better computer scientist than physicist, he has carried with him much of what he learned in physics and approaches problems with a valuable outsider’s perspective.
Advice for Young Students
There is a large space for those who are experts in domains outside of computer science but have an interest in programming and computing.
“If you look at the computing industry right now, the number of people who write software as their job has grown massively, but if you look at the number of jobs that include the word ‘programmer’ in their title it’s actually shrinking. How are these two facts consistent?”
Tim believes that companies are looking for experts in finance, biology, retail, and so on, who also have strong programming skills. This is a shift that indicates a growing need for those outside of the industry to come in and bring their expertise to the table.
For those who are passionate about computer science, this isn’t a call away from pursuing a degree in the field. There will always be the need for someone who can optimise the packages and tools and understand computing at its core. He believes, as a computer scientist, you can never take enough classes in areas like architecture, assembly code, and other low-level topics. For instance, the most value a computer scientist can give today in machine learning or AI is not in using the tools, but rather optimising them and making sure they can run well.
“A computer scientist should be so fluent in C they can write it in their sleep. Pointers, memory references, vector units, this is what people will want them for. It’s why I get concerned when students spend more time in Java. It’s a wonderful language from an object-oriented programming perspective, but it completely hides the hardware.”
Diversity in Computer Science
“I love that computer science is an international community. I work with Germans, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, people from all over the world.”
The industry relies heavily on people from all around the world. Tim is worried that the general public does not understand the extent to which the high-tech industry is reliant on immigration. Policies of protectionism that aim to restrict immigration would cause the industry to plummet. He notes that there are still many diversity issues in the field with regard to African American and female students. The issue needs to be solved at the beginning of the pipeline rather than the end, that is, to improve education about computer science to younger audiences.
Through his advice for prospective students and the education of a greater number of people about computer science, many can carve their own successful paths. Tim believes that there is, more than ever, a place for anyone who has an interest in programming or computing.