Inspirations from Hard History


The following are answers to questions submitted by Barry Morgan, a British-born journalist that lives in Accra (Ghana), for Upstream weekly newspaper. Upstream is an international oil and gas publication that is published in Oslo, Norway and serves the petroleum industry. This interview was used to prepare a three-part article that appeared in the January 27, 1997 issue of Upstream.

Emeagwali: The oil industry has been relatively progressive in adopting new technologies that will increase its profit. For example, one in ten supercomputers have been purchased by the petroleum industry and used to discover and recover more oil and gas.

However, at the big oil companies, research and development is conventional, rational and mechanistic. My research approach is multidiscipinary, unorthodox, intuitive and nature-inspired. For example, to determine better ways of recovering and discovering more oil, scientists in the petroleum industry would focus narrowly on their petroleum reservoir simulator. In contrast, I will use my nature-inspired to study evolution of plants over the past 400 million years and use the optimized branching structures of trees to design new algorithms and computers that can be used to discover and recover more oil.

African countries cannot afford to spend billions of dollars on research and development. Instead, it will be more cost-effective for African countries to invest in the transfer of technology developed in the more affluent countries.

Emeagwali: The supercomputer industry is a billion dollar industry and the oil industry have purchased ten percent of all supercomputers and used them to discover and recover more oil and gas. The fact that the petroleum industry now invests heavily in massively parallel computer technology is proof that the technology is accepted and useful.
Supercomputers of the 1980's were based on vector processor technology. At that time, IBM, Cray and other leading computer companies believed that it would be impossible to solve practical problems with massively parallel computers. In November 1989, the president of Cray Research Inc., the world's largest supercomputer company, said: "We can't find any real progress in harnessing the power of thousands of processors" (The New York Times, 11/29/89). One month later, I completed a 1057-page report that provided a detailed step-by-step method for harnessing the power of the Connection Machine computer with 65,536 processors to simulate oil reservoirs.

That triumph earned me the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of the computing field. The Gordon Bell Prize Committee wrote (IEEE Software, May 1990):

"The amount of money at stake is staggering. For example, you can typically expect to recover 10 percent of a field's oil. If you can improve your production schedule to get just 1 percent more oil, you will increase your yield by $400 million (at $20 per barrel in a 20-billion-barrel field)".

The results made the headlines in newspapers and magazines in several countries and, as a result, the oil industry was alerted that massively parallel computers can be used to recover more oil.

In my 1057-page report describing my Gordon Bell Prizewinning work, I made many surprising discoveries and set several world computational records including (1) performing the world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion (3,100,000,000) calculations per second; (2) solving the largest partial differential equations with 8 million grid points; (3) achieving an unprecedented parallel computer speedup of 2048; (4) formulating the first pseudo-time approach in reservoir modeling; (5) deriving a new set of reservoir partial differential equations that is vectorizable, parallelizable, and surprising, fifty times less computation-intensive than the original formulation; (6) proving that the use of only Dirichlet type boundary conditions yields more accurate numerical solutions in the vicinity of petroleum production wells located near the boundary and is therefore suitable for avoiding the coning problems caused by the high velocity of converging flows in the vicinity of wells; and (7) discovered the analogy between Darcy's equations used in petroleum reservoir simulations and geostrophic equations used in weather forecasting.

Emeagwali: Basically, there are two types of governing equations that can be used in reservoir modeling: the parabolic equations derived from Darcy's Law which exclude the inertia forces and the hyperbolic equations which include the inertia forces. Darcy's Law have been exclusively used since 1856 to model porous media and reservoir problems. I rejected the use of Darcy's Law.

I was not the first to denounce the use of Darcy's Law. German mathematician Paul Fillunger strongly denounced the use of Darcy's Law in the 1930's and publicly criticized Karl von Terzaghi, who is widely regarded as the founder of modern soil mechanics, for using Darcy's Law instead of the complete hyperbolic equations that I used in my work. The scientific debate between those two men later turned into personal attacks that lasted for several years.

To resolve the Fillunger-Terzaghi, a board of inquiry was appointed to determine which of them had the correct equation. In early March 1937, the board ruled that Fillunger was wrong. The resulting public humiliation forced Fillunger and his wife to commit suicide.

After Fillunger's death, Gerhard Heinrich was the only investigator that pursued Fillunger's ideas while Maurice Biot and several other investigators pursued von Terzaghi's ideas. After several years, Fillunger's original ideas and Heinrich's articles became largely forgotten while von Terzaghi's ideas and the articles of Biot became very widely accepted.

To be fair to von Terzaghi, there were several good reasons for using Darcy's Law in the 1930s. First, Darcy's Law is similar to other better understood laws such as the Fourier's Law of heat transfer, developed fifty years earlier than Darcy's Law, Ohm's Law of electric current, and Fick's Law of diffusion. The Fourier's Law states that the rate of heat transfer from a higher temperature point to a lower temperature point is approximately inversely proportional to the distance between these two points. The Ohm's, Fick's, and Darcy's Laws can be similarly stated. Because these four laws are identical they have similar governing equations. Therefore, using Darcy's Law allowed reservoir modelers to borrow analytical techniques from these other more advanced fields. For example, analytical solutions of the classical Fourier's heat equation have been known for several special cases since the second half of the nineteenth century.

However, sixty years later, Darcy's Law is now obsolete but convincing reservoir modelers to abandon this law will be like convincing the Pope to reject the standard catholic doctrine.

The idea of rejecting Darcy's Law occured to me when I observed that the flow pattern within an oil reservoir is similar to that within many geophysical problems such as the oceans and atmosphere. For example, many reservoir, oceanic and atmospheric flows are nearly horizontal in the sense that the horizontal velocity components are about 100 times larger than the vertical velocity. These horizontal flows are controlled by the pressure gradient, Coriolis, and gravitational forces. Therefore, it does not come as a surprise that meteorologists and reservoir modelers independently invented identical equations. Meteorologists call theirs geostrophic wind equations while reservoir modelers call theirs Darcy's equations. However, meteorologists have abandoned geostrophic wind equations which are not valid near the equator while reservoir modelers still use the Darcy's Law which are not valid near pumping wells with turbulent flow regime.

I also discovered that if the viscous and Coriolis forces are equal, then Darcy's and geostrophic wind equations will be exactly identical. The implication of my discovery is that the computational issues encountered in solving these problems are not application-dependent as is widely believed and should be studied as a truly multidisciplinary problem by scientists from different fields so that the resulting cross-fertilization of ideas will lead to technology transfer from one field to the other.

With the new reservoir equations that I proposed, it will not be necessary to compute the velocity distribution since it will be explicitly available from the solution of the new equations. As a result, the reservoir simulation will be more accurate when the flow-rate is high near injection and production wells.

Reservoir models has taken hundreds of man-years and tens of millions of dollars. Because of these huge prior investments it will be impractical to discard these models. Consequently, the approach that can be taken will be to modify existing models to incorporate the additional physics used my new equations.

Emeagwali: When my results first made the headlines in early 1990, the Research and Development units of Mobil, Chevron, Schlumberger, and Amoco contacted me for additional information and/or offered to hire me to work for them. I rejected their offers because (1) I was not available, (2) I wanted to pursue more unorthodox and innovative line of research, and (3) programming a 65,000 processor computer to simulate an oil reservoir, one of the 20 most difficult problems in the computing field, was a gut-wrenching experience for me and I needed a break from that line of research.

Generally, oil companies consider their reservoir simulators to be proprietary and therefore are reluctant to divurge details about them that could give other companies an edge over them.

For example, I typed the phrase "massively parallel petroleum reservoir simulation" in the Internet search engine called the webcrawler and the first 50 results were references to my research alone. Since the petroleum industry purchased 10 percent of all massively parallel supercomputers, my conclusion is that either they are keeping their work a secret or that they are not making enough progress in the programming of next-generation supercomputers.

A new initiative to commercialize massively parallel petroleum reservoir simulation is called the "Natural Gas and Oil Technology Partnership." This initiative is a collaborative effort between the United States Department of Energy's (DOE) national laboratories, computer vendors and major oil companies. As part of this initiative, Cray Research, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Amoco Production Company are jointly developing a three-dimensional reservoir simulation package that will run on a massively parallel computer.

Emeagwali: I received a flood of telephone calls from several oil companies when my discoveries were announced and I discussed my work with many researchers in the industry.

Emeagwali: Presently, I am working on nature-inspired research and I will be interested in applying my new discoveries to the petroleum industry. Recently, I formulated the theory of tessellated models for parallel computing and introduced the concepts of parallel data spaces. The latter achievements enabled me to demonstrate that sphere packing and fast calculations needed to recover and discover more oil are related subjects.

My new nature-inspired discoveries are so wacky that I might be called crazy. For example, I have discovered that algorithms, software and computers can be enantiomeric --- that is, have left- and right-handed versions like shoes. I will like to apply these ideas to practical problems in the petroleum industry.

Also, I am currently using a lot of geometrical figures to design algorithms and computers.

Emeagwali: My goal was to demonstrate that massively parallel computers can be used to discover and recover additional oil and gas. Since ten percent of massively parallel computers are now purchased by the petroleum industry, I do not feel that my ideas and work were underutilized.

On the other hand, as a black scientist, I frequently observe a tendency for white scientists to request credit for my inventions even though they never made any contribution to my work. However, this phenomenon is not unique to me.

Historically, whites have claimed credit for many important technological contributions made by Africans. For example, in the antebellum South, an African slave named Ned invented the cotton scraper machine but his owner, Oscar Stuart, convinced the United States patent to deny Ned the patent on the grounds that Ned is not a citizen. Stuart claimed that the patent belonged to him since Ned is his slave. Both Ned and Oscar Stuart were denied the patents to the cotton scraper machine and Ned was denied an opportunity to profit from his widely-used invention.

The black explorer Matthew Henson was the first man to reach the North Pole (April 6, 1909) but the credit was initially given to his white co-explorer, Peary, who arrived at the North Pole 45 minutes later.

The slave Onesimus taught his owner, a medical doctor, the African medical procedure of small pox innoculation. Onesimus' idea was dismissed as quackery and African witchcraft. But when it was discovered that it worked the credit was assigned to his owner who also published it in a medical journal.

I could go on forever listing the names of African inventors and scientists who were denied credit for their discoveries and inventions.

Emeagwali: Recovering and discovering additional oil will require a mix of technologies, including faster computers that can perform one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) calculations per second. A trillion calculations per second will provide the horsepower needed to more accurately discover and recover oil. In less than two years, the trillion calculation milestone should be achieved by using the same massively parallel technique that I used to win the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize.

Emeagwali: I studied the United States government list's of the 20 most difficult problems in the computing field and discovered that the list included reservoir simulation. I selected reservoir simulation because recovering additional oil is important to oil-producing countries, including my native country of Nigeria.

Emeagwali: I have the four traits that you mentioned and, in addition, I am considered an unorthodox researcher with a gift for generating new ideas. For example, it required dogged perseverance on my part to acquire degrees and expertise in five different fields.

It required lateral thinking to integrate my training in mathematics, science, engineering and computer science --- a skill that is necessary to implement reservoir simulators on massively parallel computers.

In the 1980's, it was generally believed that vector technology is best for designing supercomputers while I believed that massively parallel technology will lead to faster supercomputers. My belief was based on my instinctive feel that I could implement reservoir simulators on massively parallel computers.

Stubborn determination is needed to continue pursuing a line of enquiry which other scientists considered crazy. Because my proposal to use massively parallel computers for reservoir simulation was considered foolish, I could not find another researcher that would collaborate with me or an organization that would sponsor my work. Because of my stubborn determination, I refused to give up and I ended up solving the problem alone and winning the Gordon Bell Prize which in the past was won by teams of up to 18 scientists from corporations and national laboratories.

However, I do not believe that creativity is immutable and genetically encoded upon renown scientists. An individual can boost her creativity by remaining motivated, curious, openminded and imaginative.

Emeagwali: I have been dubbed the "Bill Gates of Africa" and even heard many rumors that I am worth $200 million dollars. As a result, I received several letters requesting financial donations to various causes. My high school classmate, Paul Okonkwo, told his friends: "The Philip Emeagwali I know is more interested in winning the Nobel Prize than in becoming rich." I agree and will like to point out the most renown scientists and inventors are not driven by the desire to be rich and famous.

Emeagwali: I am a lateral and unorthodox thinker who draws lots of analogies from natural observations.

The new problem-solving approach of designing computer networks by observing and emulating patterns in nature is one that I pioneered. Being born and raised in a low-tech African environment enabled me to have a greater appreciation of the usefulness of drawing design inspirations and ideas from natural analogies. While my American- and European-born colleagues depend on a rational and mechanistic approach to problem-solving, I depend on both a logistic and inspirational approach to problem-solving. I believe that Mother Nature is a wizard problem-solver which has used trial-and-error approaches, over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, to derive the most optimal solutions.

Furthermore, the trial-and-error approach of nature yields more solutions than the logical approach used by humans. As a result, drawing inspirations from nature has enabled me to discover several computer networks. However, after designing from nature, I use advanced mathematical methods to analyze my inventions.

Emeagwali: I encourage my son to read a new book each day.

Emeagwali: I use others definition of myself to define myself. People define me according to their own experiences and what they could relate to. Among the Igbos, Nigerians, Africans and African-Americans, I am defined as an Igbo, Nigerian, African and African-American scientist, respectively.

Emeagwali: Many Nigerians have attributed my success to the Igbo's can-do spirit which enables them to start from very humble beginnings and rise to the top. I will give a few examples. Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped and sold into slavery in an American plantation. Yet, he overcame the tremendous brutality of that institution to author a book (The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, 1789) that was instrumental in the dismantling of the institution of slavery. Jaja of Opobo rose from being a slave to become one of the greatest African kings. Dick Tiger, rose from picking discarded bottles to become three-time world boxing champion and one of the greatest boxers of all times. These three individuals had the Igbo's spirit of hardwork, perseverance, determination and innovation.

As a black man living in America, my son is going to encounter racism which will deny him the opportunity to contribute as much as he can to society. I want my son and other young children to be inspired by the fact I was a high school dropout and ex refugee who overcame racism and made scientific contributions that benefitted mankind.

Emeagwali: Because my wife is a non-Igbo speaker (African-American) and my son did not hear daily conversations in Igbo, it was difficult for him to learn the language. However, I have taught him a few Igbo words and phrases.

Emeagwali: No, I do not have any association with AABE.

Emeagwali: My wife and I lead an annual science workshop for inner city youths that receives lots of media coverage. My website (emeagwali.com) is used as a teaching resource in American classrooms and I end up mentoring some of these students by electronic mail. The Mayor of Saint Paul, Minnesota appointed me to serve on his Shelter Board that serves the homeless. I serve on the Board of Directors of several organizations.

Emeagwali: I am concerned about the disparity between the living standards in developed and developing countries of the world. I am bothered by discrimination based on race, nationality, culture, sex, and religion; human rights violation and torture of political prisoners; and oppression of refugees and migrant workers.

Emeagwali: I value spending time with my family; community activities that help others; and making positive scientific contributions to society.

Emeagwali: As a pre-teenager, I only read mathematics books. As a 13-year old dropout and Biafran war refugee, I could not find any mathematics books to read so I read classics such as Weep Not Child (James Ngugi), Cry the Beloved Country (Alan Paton) and Up From Slavery (Booker T. Washington). Learning about other cultures from these books expanded my horizons.

As an adult, I enjoy reading the works of African writers and writers of African descent such as Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe), The Destruction of Black Civilization (Chancellor Williams), and the important Afrocentric books.

Emeagwali: I was inspired when I read Malcolm X's account (The Autobiography of Malcolm X) of his struggles as a young black man in America. I was moved by Nathan McCall's story (Make Me Wanna Holler) which is a first-hand account of the black rage in American inner cities and socio-economic underclass.

I was inspired by the 18th century letters of the black mathematician Benjamin Bannekar to former U.S. president Thomas Jefferson. Bannekar's amazing mathematical calculations impressed and convinced Jefferson that Africans possess the same intellectual capacity as whites and therefore should be freed from slavery.

Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop's classic book "The African Origin of Civilization," will influence my current research on how the Greeks learned mathematics from Africans.

Emeagwali: I am extremely demanding on my self and work very long hours. However, I am not an obsessed scientist; my interests are varied and my life is balanced. During the past few weeks, I saw concert performances by Jimmy Cliff, Chaka Khan, Tabu Ley Rochereau and King Sunny Ade.

Emeagwali: Yes, I had lots of obstacles put in my way but I have managed to overcome them.

Emeagwali: As long as I am making important discoveries, I will continue conducting research. Otherwise, I will change careers to a field that will use some of the transferable skills that I acquired as a scholar/scientist.

Emeagwali: I receive daily letters from young people of African descent who tell me that I have inspired them and that I am their role model. In that sense I see myself as a role model

Emeagwali: American cities are ethnically diverse and exciting. Technologically, the United States is ahead of any country in the world which helps me keep abreast of the latest developments in the computing field.

What I dislike about the United States is that racism is pervasive and deeply ingrained into Americans. For an ambitious black professional, the United States is one of the worst countries to live in. For example, white males are 35 percent of the population but hold 95 percent of the top level and best-paid jobs. Many African Ph.D. degree holders are driving taxi cabs and the few who found professional jobs complain that they are supervised by less educated and experienced white males.

Emeagwali: Africa.

YES, I WOULD LIKE TO POST MY COMMENTS.

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