Philip Emeagwali Supercomputer | Famous Scientists and their Inventions | African American Inventors

I’m Philip Emeagwali. The computer is the greatest invention, since fire. The modern supercomputer is the greatest invention in modern physics. I believe that we are witnessing a technological change of tectonic proportion. Each generation redefined the word “computer.” Our descendants’ definition of the computer will perhaps become synonymous and correspond to our phrase “planetary-sized super-brain that enshrouds our Earth.” In Year Million, I foresee each post-human person as a super-intelligent cyborg that is part human, part machine, and part computer and that has a great sense of humor. I foresee their super-brains as enshrouding even the Solar System and as one super being
that can live forever.

When parallel supercomputing
meets the biggest questions
in computational science,
the impossible-to-solve becomes possible-to-solve.
Parallel supercomputing
is the vital technology
that enables us to ask
the biggest questions
and then find new answers
to those previously unanswered questions.
I’m Philip Emeagwali.
Back on February 1, 1922,
a science-fiction story was published
in the book titled: “Weather Prediction
by Numerical Process.”
That science-fiction story
described how, in theory,
64,000 human computers
could be employed and used to solve the
partial differential equations
that must be used
to predict the weather
for the whole Earth.
Back on June 20, 1974,
in Corvallis, Oregon, United States,
the day I began programming supercomputers,
I set my mind on programming
the fastest supercomputer.
A decade later,
my supercomputer-hopeful
became a new internet
that is a new global network of
64 binary thousand processors.
On July 4, 1989, I figured out
how to hindcast the weather
and do so one mile deep
inside an oilfield
that is the size of a town.
That massively parallel supercomputer
that is a new internet de facto
that I set my mind on
ultimately became my
signature invention
that became the subject
of school reports.
My contribution
to the development of the computer
is this:
I was the first person to figure out
how to turn the science fiction
of parallel processing across
millions of processors
into the non-fiction
that is today’s supercomputer
that occupies the space of a soccer field.
The reason I remember the date
I discovered
practical parallel supercomputing
was that it was the U.S.
Independence Day.

[The First Supercomputer Scientist]

You cannot study to become
the first parallel supercomputer scientist.
You can study to become
an aerospace engineer.
But you cannot study
to become the first astronaut
or to travel to the planet Mars.
You become a pioneer astronaut
by becoming the first person
to travel to Mars.
Similarly, you cannot study
to become the first person
to figure out how to harness
practical parallel supercomputing
and do so to solve real-world problems.
I’m Philip Emeagwali.
I became the first parallel supercomputer scientist
because I was the first person
that performed the world’s fastest parallel processed calculations
that solved real-world problems
and because I was the only person
to accomplish that alone,
as opposed to team research.

[What is the World’s Fastest Computer?]

What is the world’s fastest computer?
Speed is the core essence
of the supercomputer.
The first newspaper article
on the supercomputer
was dated February 15, 1946
and appeared on page one
of The New York Times.
That first newspaper article was titled:
[quote]
“Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering.”
[unquote]
Airplanes fly at about the same speed they flew in the 1950s.
If today’s parallel supercomputer speed
of a thousand million billion calculations per second
was discovered in the 1950s
that decade’s supercomputer
could compute three million billion
times faster.
That first supercomputer of 1946
could only perform
385 multiplications per second
or 40 divisions per second
or three square root calculations
per second.

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Philip Emeagwali 190929 2