Philip Emeagwali, biography, A Father of the Internet, supercomputer pioneer, Nigerian scientist, inventor

Title: Supercomputer Pioneer

Location : Photo taken from the Detroit Free Press, page 1E, May 29, 1990

Date: May 27, 1990

Transparency: 35mm

Print: 8 x 10 color

Copyright: Detroit Free Press


Downloadable Digital Photos:
Higher quality photo can be viewed here and downloaded by right-clicking on it.
You may grab and drop a low resolution JPG version for your home printer and website.
Professionals may grab and drop an uncompressed version to their desktops.


Biography:
Philip Emeagwali was born in Nigeria in 1954. Due to civil war in his country, he was forced to drop out of school at age 12 and was conscripted into the Biafran army at age 14. After the war ended, he completed his high school equivalency by self-study and came to the United States on a scholarship in 1974.

After 15 years of study and research, Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize, which has been called "supercomputing's Nobel Prize," for inventing a formula that allows computers to perform fast computations --- a discovery that inspired the reinvention of supercomputers.

He was extolled by then U.S. president Bill Clinton as "one of the great minds of the Information Age" and described by CNN as "a father of the Internet." According to data from overture.com, Emeagwali is the modern scientist most searched-for on the Internet.

Using the computer shown in the background, Emeagwali remotely connected to a massively parallel supercomputer located in the nuclear weapons center called Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. That supercomputer contains 65,536 processors that are networked together as a twelve-dimensional hypercube. The supercomputer contains 4096 nodes with each node consisting of 16 processors. It is used for nuclear simulations, extracting oil and gas, and studies of the atmosphere. In the 1980s, it was widely believed that it will be impossible to program thousands of processors to outperform conventional supercomputers. In 1988, Emeagwali proved the skeptics wrong by programming all 65,536 processors to perform the world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second.


Keywords:
Internet, supercomputers, supercomputing, supercomputer scientist, physicist, mathematician, Philip Emeagwali.


Uncompressed Digital Photo:
Upon request, a 50 megabyte (highest quality) uncompressed image will be posted at the FTP site of emeagwali.com.


More information:
The photos posted on this website represent a small portion of the photos in our library. Upon request, 35 mm transparencies and 8 x 10 color prints will be provided for a nominal fee. If you don't find what you are searching for, please don't hesitate to visit emeagwali.com or contact Dr. Donita Brown below:

Philip Emeagwali, biography, A Father of the Internet, supercomputer pioneer, Nigerian scientist, inventor

Click on emeagwali.com for more information.
Philip Emeagwali, biography, A Father of the Internet, supercomputer pioneer, Nigerian scientist, inventor