Ever
heard of the world’s fastest and most efficient computer? It was actually
invented by a Nigerian, by name, Dr. Philip Emeagwali. Dr. Emeagwali carefully
studied the efficient ways in which bees communicate and build honeycombs and
decided to create a computer that could work that way.
The result was that he successfully combined 65,000 processors
to invent the world’s fastest the computer, which performs computations at 3.1
billion calculations per second. Today, Dr. Philip Emeagwali’s invention is
applied in weather forecasting supercomputers as well as computers which can
predict global warming.
Philip
Emeagwali (born 23 August 1954) is a Nigerian computer scientist. He won the
1989 Gordon Bell Prize for price-performance in high-performance computing
applications, in an oil reservoir modeling calculation using a novel
mathematical formulation and implementation.
Biography
Philip
Emeagwali was born in Akure, Nigeria on 23 August 1954. He was raised in
Onitsha in the South Eastern part of Nigeria. His early schooling was suspended
in 1967 as a result of the Nigerian Civil War. At 13 years, he served in
the Biafran army.
After the war he completed high-school equivalence through self-study.
He is
married to Dale Brown Emeagwali, a
noted African-American microbiologist.
Education
He
traveled to the United States to study under a scholarship following completion
of a correspondence course at the University of London. He received a bachelor's
degree in mathematics from Oregon State University in 1977. He
later moved to Washington D.C., receiving in 1986 a master's
degree from George Washington University in ocean
and marine engineering, and a second master's in applied mathematics from
the University of Maryland. Next magazine
suggested that Emeagwali claimed to have further degrees. During this
time, he worked as a civil engineer at the Bureau of Land Reclamation in Wyoming.
Court case and the denial of degree
Emeagwali
studied for a Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan from 1987 through
1991. His thesis was not accepted by a committee of internal and external
examiners and thus he was not awarded the degree. Emeagwali filed a court
challenge, stating that the decision was a violation of his civil rights and
that the university had discriminated against him in several ways because of
his race. The court challenge was dismissed, as was an appeal to the Michigan
state Court of Appeals.
Supercomputing
Emeagwali
received the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for an application of
the CM-2 massively-parallel computer. The
application used computational fluid dynamics for
oil-reservoir modeling. He received a prize in "price/performance"
category, with a performance figure of about 400 Mflops/$1M. The winner in
the "performance" category, was also the winner of the
Price/performance category, but unable to receive two prizes. Mobil Research
and Thinking Machines, used the CM-2 for seismic data processing and achieved
the higher ratio of 500 Mflops/$1M. The judges decided on one award per entry. His
method involved each microprocessor communicating with six neighbors
Emeagwali's
simulation was the first program to apply a pseudo-time approach to reservoir
modeling.
Accolades
Price/performance–1989 Gordon Bell
Prize, IEEE ($1,000
prize)
New African "35th-greatest
African (and greatest African scientist) of all time
He was
cited by Bill Clinton as an example of what
Nigerians can achieve when given the opportunity and is frequently
featured in popular press articles for Black History Month.
Selected publications
Emeagwali, P. (2003). How
do we reverse the brain drain. speech given at
Emeagwali, P. (1997). Can Nigeria leapfrog into the information age. In World Igbo Congress. New York: August.
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