TIME magazine called him
“the unsung hero behind the Internet.”
CNN called him “A Father of the Internet.”
President Bill Clinton called him
“one of the great minds of the Information
Age.”
He has been voted history’s greatest scientist
of African descent.
He is Philip Emeagwali.
He is coming to Trinidad and Tobago
to launch the 2008 Kwame Ture lecture series
on Sunday June 8
at the JFK [John F. Kennedy] auditorium
UWI [The University of the West Indies]
Saint Augustine 5 p.m.
The Emancipation Support Committee
invites you to come and hear this inspirational
mind
address the theme:
“Crossing New Frontiers
to Conquer Today’s Challenges.”
This lecture is one you cannot afford to miss.
Admission is free.
So be there on Sunday June 8
5 p.m.
at the JFK auditorium UWI St. Augustine.
[Wild applause and cheering for 22 seconds]
[Philip Emeagwali: A Father of the Internet]
[How I Invented a New Internet]
Who invented the internet?
The Internet
has many fathers and mothers
as well as aunts and uncles.
We can only have
one father of the Internet
that invented a new internet.
The father of the Internet
should at least invent a new internet.
I am called a father of the Internet because
I am the only father of the Internet
that invented a new internet.
I invented my new internet
by, first, theorizing it back in 1974
and then continuously developed it
for the subsequent fifteen years
and developed
that small copy of the internet
and did so until I actualized it
as the fastest computation
back on the Fourth of July 1989.
My two-raised-to-power sixteen commodity-off-the-shelf
processors
were tightly-coupled to each other
and were equal distances apart
from each other.
I mathematically visualized
my 64 binary thousand processors
as tightly-encircling a hyper globe
that is bounded
by the hypersurface
of a sixteen-dimensional hypersphere
that is embedded
within a sixteen-dimensional hyperspace.
I visualized
the physical and mathematical domains
of my extreme-scale, high-resolution
general circulation model
as the 62-mile deep
hyper-spherical shell
that was bounded by two hyperspheres.
The inner hypersphere
has a diameter of 7,900 miles
that corresponded to
the surface of the Earth.
The outer hypersphere
has a diameter of 7,962 miles
that corresponded
to the outer boundary
of the atmosphere of the Earth.
I visualized
the two-raised-to-power sixteen
vertices of my hypercube
to be midway (or 31 miles)
between those two hyperspheres.
I drew parallels
between my new internet
that was a new global network
of processors
and how I envisioned
simulating global warming.
My two hyperspheres
were parallel to each other.
My two hyperspheres
extended in the same direction.
My two hyperspheres
never converged or diverged.
My 65,536 processors
were paralleled
with respect to the climate model
that I divided into
65,536 smaller climate models.
Those climate models
were identical in domain size.
[Paradigm Shift in Computing]
My discovery
of practical parallel supercomputing
created a paradigm shift
on how we look
at the computer and the internet
of tomorrow.
Practical parallel supercomputing
led to my new definition
of the supercomputer
as powered by millions upon millions
of processors,
rather than one singular processor.
Practical parallel supercomputing
was mocked, ridiculed, and rejected
during the sixty-seven years
onward of its first conceptualization
that occurred in print
back on February 1, 1922.
After my discovery
of practical parallel supercomputing
that occurred on the Fourth of July 1989,
the supercomputer industry
took my invention
and made it the vital technology
within every supercomputer.
But for the sixty-seven years
prior to my invention,
practical parallel supercomputing
remained in the realm of science-fiction.
My contribution
to the development of the computer
is this:
I upgraded
the parallel supercomputer
from science-fiction to non-fiction.
I discovered how to maintain
a one-problem to one-processor correspondence,
or analogy,
between the smaller
general circulation models
and the processors.
I discovered
how to communicate synchronously
and how to compute simultaneously
and how to communicate and compute and do
both 65,536 times faster
and do both on 65,536
central processing units,
and across sixteen times
as many email paths.
In other words, I paradigm shifted
in my email communication
across my new internet.
I discovered
how to harness processors
and how to shift
from the singular,
person-to-person email
to the plural
processor-to-processor emails
that I synchronized across
my new internet
that is a new global network of
65,536 tightly-coupled
central processing units.
That new global network defined
a parallel supercomputer
that is a new internet de facto.
I invented a new internet
that tightly-encircled a hyper globe.
My hyper globe is shaped like a
sixteen-dimensional hypersphere
in a sixteen-dimensional hyperspace.
My supercomputing paradigm
shifted because
I computed simultaneously
on 64 binary thousand
central processing units
and emailed synchronously
across one binary million email wires.
That was how I discovered
that practical parallel processing
must be vital
to the supercomputer
that solves many problems at once,
or in parallel.
[President Bill Clinton on the Contributions
of Philip Emeagwali]
That invention
of practical parallel supercomputing
embodied
the Philip Emeagwali formula
that then U.S. President Bill Clinton praised
in his White House speech
that was delivered on August 26, 2000.
President Bill Clinton
recognized my contribution
to the development of the
parallel supercomputer, in part, because
it made the news headlines,
eleven years earlier.
That contribution
was my experimental discovery
of how to record
the fastest computations
and how to record
those fastest computations
and record them
across a parallel supercomputer.
I recorded those fastest computations
by solving 65,536 problems at once,
instead of solving only
one problem at a time.
[Philip Emeagwali: A Father of the Internet]
I’m often asked:
What is Philip Emeagwali
known for?
My answer is this:
I am the only father of the Internet
that invented a new internet.
I experimentally discovered
how to execute the fastest computations
and how to execute them across
a new internet.
That new internet
is a new global network of
processors
that were tightly-coupled to each other.
I visualized the processors
of my new internet to be equidistant
from each other
and to be evenly spread out across
the surface of a globe
that I also visualized
as embedded within
a sixteen-dimensional hyperspace.
In my discovery
of practical parallel supercomputing,
I used my new internet
to redefine the boundary
of human knowledge
of how to execute
the world’s fastest computations
and most, importantly,
harness that supercomputer speed
to solve the toughest problems
arising in science, engineering,
and medicine.
[Wild applause and cheering for 17 seconds]
Insightful and brilliant lecture
