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I'm Philip Emeagwali. I was in the news headlines for my discovery of practical parallel supercomputing that occurred on the Fourth of July 1989. That discovery was highlighted in the June 20, 1990 issue of the Wall Street Journal, as well as by the two top mathematical societies, namely, the American Mathematical Society and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. As a result of the publicity from that discovery, I received telephone calls from supercomputer manufacturers, including calls from the office of Seymour Cray that later described the discovery of practical parallel supercomputing
as [quote unquote]

“a transforming event.”

Four years after my discovery
of practical parallel supercomputing,
and in 1993, the supercomputer company of Seymour Cray switched over
from the sequential supercomputer
to the parallel supercomputer
that it formerly mocked and ridiculed
as a huge waste of everybody’s time.
My contribution
to the development of the supercomputer is this:

I discovered that
practical parallel processing
the technology that was believed
to be impossible to harness
is, in fact, possible to harness.

I discovered that
Amdahl’s Law speedup limit
that was described
in supercomputer textbooks
as a limit of a factor of
eight-fold speed increase
is not a limit on the speedups
of the times-to-solution
of grand challenge problems.
I must confess that
I struggled
to come to terms with my own success
and my contributions
to the development of the supercomputer.
The parallel supercomputer
was the most complicated machinery ever built.
Because the new technology
was extremely difficult to understand,
I was the only full time programmer
of the most massively parallel supercomputer of the 1980s.
I was the only person because
only one supercomputer programmer
was successfully parallel processing grand challenge problems
and doing so back in the 1980s.
As an aside, each generation
knows more than their predecessors.
Eventually, the student
will know more than his teachers.
At age thirty-four [34],
I knew more about
the parallel supercomputer than Seymour Cray did.
Seymour Cray taught every person something about the vector supercomputer.
In the 1980s, vector processing
was the dominant paradigm
in supercomputing.
Today, vector processing is obsolete
and was replaced by parallel processing
that is the new paradigm
in supercomputing.
Back in the 1970s, mathematical physics
was my springboard
to the parallel supercomputer.
Calculus is the study of change,
algebra is the generalization
of arithmetical operations,
and geometry is the study of shapes.

That petroleum reservoir simulation
makes it possible
to discover and recover
the most crude oil and natural gas.
That complicated mathematics
and its companion
supercomputer algorithms
was how I discovered
how to transform the theory
of massively parallel processing
that was first published
as a science fiction story
back on February 1, 1922.
My contribution to science is this:

I discovered
how to turn that science fiction
to the non-fiction
that is known as
practical parallel processing
that is the vital technology
that powers the supercomputers
that are used to forecast the weather above the surface of the Earth
as well as hindcast the [quote unquote] “weather”
below the surface of the Earth.

Back in 1989,
I was in the news headlines because
I discovered
how to use parallel supercomputers
and use them to bring out crude oil
and natural gas
that were buried one mile deep
and buried millions of years ago.
A mathematician may be immortalized
for millions of years
by the partial differential equation
she invented,
a physicist may be immortalized
by her discovery
of how to solve unsolved problems
arising in extreme-scale
mathematical physics,
but a computer scientist
should only be immortalized
by his invention
of the world’s fastest computer
that is a million (or a billion) times faster than previous computers.

For information about Philip Emeagwali,
http://emeagwali.com
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https://flickr.com/philipemeagwali
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TOPICS
African American Inventors, black history month, famous black inventors, Black Inventors, Black Scientists, Famous Engineers of the 21st Century, today, still alive, in history, black, African, Nigerian, African American Inventors and Engineers, African American engineers, black history month guest speakers, school assembly, black history month inventors, Keynote speakers, Conference Keynote Speakers, Technology Keynote Speakers, Futurist Keynote Speakers, Technology Futurist, Educator,





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