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Philip Emeagwali got his breakthrough in 1989, making scientists better understand how oil flows underground. The project was for his doctoral dissertation. Instead of using one supercomputer which costs $30 million a pop and uses eight high-powered processors, the native Nigerian and former high school dropout resorted to the Internet to access 65,536 smaller computers, each working in parallel on a small part of the problem. As a result, Dr. Emeagwali, 41, is credited with setting a world record for the fastest computation at 3.1 billion calculations per second. That was three times the speed of the fastest supercomputers of the day --- at one-fifth the cost. His work helped improve yields from oil reservoirs and broke ground for a new world of supercomputing. And it all started on the Internet, which Emeagwali used to access a system called the Connection Machine. Just picture the conventional $30 million supercomputer as eight oxen pulling a cart and the Connection Machine as about 65,000 chickens pulling the same cart," he says. "The old thinking is that the oxen will do a better job, but if the chickens coordinate their efforts, they'll do a better job than the oxen. That's what my 65,536 small computers achieved: 3.1 billion calculations per second. The supercomputer was nowhere in sight with all its $30 million purchase price." More recently, Emeagwali has plans to relocate his research company from Baltimore to California, possibly in the Silicon Valley area, he says. In the meantime, he is continuing to push the limits of computer networking, including developing systems powerful enough to simulate weather trends over a century to investigate atmospheric warming. Reported in the May/June/July 1998 issue of Turning Point magazine. Click on emeagwali.com for more information.