Granddaughter ‘wept’ as Creeslough’s Kay McNulty is remembered at new data centre

The Kay McNulty Data Centre was officially opened in ATU Letterkenny last Tuesday evening. 

The existing data centre was renamed in honour of the Creeslough-born mathematician and computing pioneer. Kay was one of the original programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer.

Kay’s granddaughter Naomi Most attended the opening along with Eileen Gallagher, CEO of INEX. The dedication to Kay honours her achievements as a leading light in computing and a native of Donegal.

Naomi was close to her grandmother, who passed away in 2006 at the age of 85. Naomi grew up in Philadelphia, where Kay called home, and now lives in San Francisco, California, where she works as a software engineer.

Naomi has visited her family’s roots in Creeslough before, but flying over to the data centre in memory of her beloved granny filled her with emotion.

“I wept when I got here just to see it,” Naomi told DonegalLive. “It’s really beautiful. It’s nice to know that people are continuing to discover and get to know more specifically what it was that she and those other five women in that group really did, because it’s quite remarkable. Sometimes it gets unearthed and it’s like ‘oh, they learned to programme it’, but people don’t take into account the idea of programming as a thing in the first place was something they invented.

“My granny died in 2006, but as she was dying she started saying her prayers in Irish and we hadn’t heard her speak in Irish for most of her life. I started to remember that and then in the pandemic I started studying Irish and I decided I would come back here more and try to get more Irish.”

Kay always had a passion for mathematics, which was the foundation of her career.

“Computing as a thing didn’t exist,” says Naomi. “She went into mathematics, and the way that she would say it is that mathematics is this lovely puzzle, it was just a constant stream of amazing puzzles to solve. She couldn’t get enough of it. 

“When she went into mathematics at Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania, where she got a full scholarship, she did differential equations and all the different types of calculus. She basically gobbled up every single bit of mathematics she could get her hands on and none of it was difficult - that’s the way she described it. I don’t know what that means for her specifically as difficulty is subjective, but that’s the way she experienced it. It was just the most natural thing for her to do math.

“She graduated with this degree in mathematics at a time in history where men were being summoned off for war efforts and there were gaps to be filled in computing."

Kay worked on the development of ENIAC in Philadelphia during World War Two as part of the US army’s war efforts.

“The first electronic computer ENIAC was funded by the US army because doing ballistic tables by hand was costly and slow,” explains Naomi. “You had to have all these people whose job was computer - sitting there calculating things by hand. That was my grandmother’s job and that was also the job of all these other women that they were hiring into the war effort, because all the other men were being summoned off to fight closer to the frontlines or directly in the military.”

Naomi says Kay’s legacy has set off a number of people in their careers - including ATU lecturer Ruth Lennon who organised the event.

Naomi says her granny “would absolutely love” the data centre. “She would also feel silly, like ‘oh I don’t know if I did all that’, in a very Irish lady kind of way.

“It’s important to give people opportunities no matter where they come from or who they are. Everyone has a perspective or an interesting experience to lend. I hear from the people who organised this event and built this data centre that this is very much on their minds. They want to make sure that this data centre represents a place where you can try things out and build things and innovate. Anyone can, and it’s really neat that they’ve brought all these people internationally from different angles, different organisations, to come and witness this because I think that speaks a lot to the idea that innovation can come from anywhere.”

In addition to the opening of the data centre, a panel with members of the International Standards Organization met in the ATU Letterkenny campus.

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The original data centre was created 13 years ago and has been fully rebuilt in a new location with an accessible-friendly two-aisle (hot centre aisle) data centre design. The teaching data centre is a student-friendly facility designed to allow all aspects of computing to be simulated, visualised, experienced and worked on.

While not affiliated with any singular computing course, it lends itself to Computing science with digital forensics at undergrad and post grad levels, as well as cloud computing.