emeagwali.com
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Emeagwali (far right) family photo taken on December 24, 1962.
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Emeagwali’s breakthrough in the speed of calculations made international headlines because
until that time, it had been
believed that it would be impossible to program thousands of processors to outperform
supercomputers. Emeagwali’s discovery established the actuality that the collective power
of thousands of processors could indeed be harnessed. This knowledge was the crucial turning point
that inspired the
reinvention of supercomputers to utilize thousands of processors.
A measure of the economic impact is that the supercomputer market is now $6 billion a year and the most powerful models cost $250 million each.
Because the computer was the supercomputer of the past, it is
believed that the supercomputer will become the computer of the future.
Emeagwali is the only computer scientist or mathematician to be extolled at length by a United States president in a
televised speech (August 26, 2000). Bill Clinton called him “one of the great minds of the Information Age” and "the Bill Gates of Africa."
Emeagwali commenced a research project at Oregon State University
that lead to the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize (May 1975, Corvallis, Oregon).
Philip and Dale Emeagwali at the Gordon Bell Prize award ceremony,
Cathedral Hill Hotel, San Franscisco,
California. February 28, 1990. (Three months later, the couple welcomed their first child, Ijeoma. In 1996,
Dale Emeagwali was voted the Scientist of the Year by the National Technical Association
for her contributions to cancer research.)
Emeagwali invented the hyperball network and in 1988 used a hypercube
computer powered by 65,536 processors to establish the world record of 3.1 billion
calculations per second.
Emeagwali was described by
CNN as “a father of the Internet” and
profiled in the book "History of the Internet."
The above diagram presents the information pathways of a hypercube computer with 32 nodes. The 32 pink dots represent 32 computing nodes, and the five lines, emanating to and from each node, represent communication channels. In his prize-winning discovery, Emeagwali demonstrated how to program a computer with 12 bi-directional communication channels emanating to and from each node to solve the most difficult problems in the computing field.
The actual diagram of the 4,096 nodes used by Emeagwali is too complex to be grasped by the human eye. In performing his calculations, Emeagwali divided a huge oilfield into 65,536 smaller oilfields and then distributed these problems to 65,536 processors that were networked together as a 12-dimensional hypercube with 16 processors at each of its 4,096 nodes.
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The hyperball network was invented by Emeagwali. In its early years, the Internet was a planar network covering parts of the United States. It has now converged to a hyperball "world wide" network covering the entire Earth.
In the 1990s, the supercomputer was reinvented as a hypercube network. In a few decades, the computer
will "disappear" into the Internet and, in essence, converge to a hyperball-shaped computing and communicating device.
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For the preceding 18 equations and algorithms, the petroleum industry regards Emeagwali as an “unorthodox innovator [who] has
pushed back the boundaries of oilfield science” (Upstream, January 27, 1997).
Emeagwali contributed to the body of knowledge used in reservoir simulators --- tools used to determine the best strategies for injecting water into an oilfield to eject oil and gas out of that field. The simulation of huge oilfields was classified in the 1980s by the United States Government as one of the twenty most difficult problems
in the supercomputing field.
Emeagwali won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for, in part, solving the preceding problem by
successfully encoding Newton’s second law of motion --- a set of factual statements
that describe reality --- as nine (partial differential) equations used for “seeing” inside an
oilfield. Because his new equations incorporated inertial forces, they were more accurate
and thus enabled enhanced oil recovery.
The Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics
(SIAM News, May 1990) wrote that “his [Emeagwali's] calculation is of real importance and…
solves problems faster...,” and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(Software, May 1990) stated that “the amount of money at stake is staggering.”
Emeagwali's Q & A on his 18 equations and algorithms.
(May 9, 1996, The Science Museum of Minnesota, Saint Paul).
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Several books on the History of the Internet described Emeagwali's contributions.
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