The Inventor of the World’s Fastest Computer
Often called the “Bill Gates of Africa,” Dr. Philip Emeagwali an amazing scientist born in Nigeria has carved a distinguished career in the world of technology. While various scientists contributed to the overall development of the internet, according to Time Magazine “the Web owes much of its existence to Philip Emeagwali, a math whiz who came up with the formula for allowing a large number of computers to communicate at once.”
Forced to drop out of school while young, due to collateral consequences of Nigeria’s brutal civil war, Dr. Emeagwali’s father resorted to a home-trained education where the young student was forced to continue his studies without teacher support and perform demanding math work including such incredible feats of solving more than 100 math problems in a hour each day.
Refusing to give into his circumstances, Emeagwali’s work paid off as he gained a scholarship to Oregon State University in 1974 where he went on to earn a degree in Mathematics. Emeagwali continued his studies earning a Ph.D. in scientific computing from the University of Michigan as well as additional degrees from George Washington University and the University of Maryland.
Emeagwali rose to prominence after his scientific accomplishments during the 1980’s which highlighted the ways in which computers could talk to each other. While at the University of Michigan, Emeagwali became involved in research on oil reserves and began making his mark as a scientist. Research was being done on gauging the true extent of oil reseviors and Emeagwali determined that rather than using expensive supercomputers as a means of detecting existing oil reserves he could utilize thousands of microprocessors to perform these calculations.
After extensive research Emeagwali found part of the solution to this issue, lay sitting unused and gathering dusk in the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The Connection Machine had been created to simulate nuclear explosions. After a tremendous amount of effort to make the machine work, the scientists gave up; however the machine became an important tool for other discoveries once in Emeagwali’s hands.
The machine was programmed to run over 65,500 interconnected microprocessors simultaneously. In 1987 Emeagwali applied to and successfully gained the right to use the machine and went on to program it remotely from his location at the University of Michigan. His program was an astounding success as it correctly calculated the amount of oil in a simulated reservoir and more importantly and relatively unknown to the general public, Emeagwali had programmed the thousands of microprocessor to each talk to an additional six microprocessors a piece which resulted in the machine being able to perform over 3.1 billion calculations per second.
The world had now come across a new and inexpensive way for computers all over the world to communicate to each other. The oil industry jumped on the new development and created the Hyperball International Network which represented a virtual planetary web of superfast digital communications.
As an acknowledgement of his paradigm changing accomplishment, in 1989 Emeagwali received the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ (IEEE) Gordon Bell Prize, widely accepted as the Nobel Prize of computing.
He has gone on to win hundreds of computing awards and Apple Computer has used his microprocessor technology in the PowerMac G4 computer. Additionally, his work is being used to predict the weather and to determine the impact of global warming. He currently resides in the nation’s capital with his family.
For more information visit http://emeagwali.com/