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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
2010 Women to Watch
IBM's Catherine Crawford: Soccer mom, with a knack for supercomputers
By James M. Connolly
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Catherine Crawford
Senior Technical Staff Member, IBM Corp.
Education: Bachelor’s degree, mechanical engineering, MIT; master’s degree and Ph.D., mechanical and aerospace engineering, Princeton University
Noteworthy: Led IBM’s effort to build the first petaflop (one thousand trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer.
And more: Dedicated to using soccer to help the girls on her 9-year-old daughter’s soccer team to thrive in math and science.
Entry into tech
“I grew up in Manchester (N.H.) and attended public schools. But spent a summer in a program at St. Paul’s School. If I look back, that is the one thing that really got me to understand how much I enjoy math and science. It was an AP physics program for gifted New Hampshire students.”
Mentors
She readily names a half dozen. “I think my first important mentor was Swati Sharma, a high school teacher I had for trigonometry my sophomore year. Swati believed in me and gave me all the problems I needed to work on to keep me excited about math.”
Success at IBM
“I knew I’d be finishing up school, and I also was engaged to be married, so I needed to be somewhere where my husband (software engineer) could get work too.
Manufacturing
“I wanted to be a researcher, but a friend advised me that I would be much more valuable as a researcher if I first learned how things were made.”
The Roadrunner supercomputer and new lifestyle
“A few things came together. I had an opportunity in the systems and technology group on a project to build a petaflop computer for Los Alamos National Lab. My third child was on the way, and at the same time my mother became ill. IBM made it possible for me to take the assignment, work from home, and help take care of my mother. My husband could become a stay-at-home dad.”
Roadrunner was based on standard hardware, 6,500 Advanced Micro Devices Opteron processors and the IBM Cell Broadband engine. “We decided we would make the project focused on software, mostly systems and application runtime software.”
Accomplishments
“I helped to build the first petaflop computer, and people think that’s amazing. But I don’t want people to judge me on that. I know my greatest accomplishment at the end of the day is that I have my three children and my husband. You can do incredible things in technology but I always have to keep that balanced with my family life.”
Thoughts on Crawford, from Nancy A. Greco, Distinguished Engineer and Catherine Crawford’s direct manager at IBM
“What’s unique about Cait is that she not only can see the big picture, she can break it down into components in terms of what has to get done or what has to be built. … She can show people the big picture and how they fit into it, and that’s why they get excited about it.”
“What I like about Cait also is that she is getting kids more interested in science. What helps is that with her as a coach, kids know that she is a scientist, but she’s a real person and she’s fun. They need a role model, so that they can think, ‘This person looks like me. I can be smart and I can be athletic.’ ”
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