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]
[My Biggest Obstacle]
Back in the 1970s and ‘80s,
my unorthodox parallel processing approach
to supercomputing
met a lot of resistance.
I was rejected and mocked
whenever I proposed that
parallel processing will work.
In those two decades,
my massively parallel processing supercomputing
premise
was that
the logic of the grand challenge problem
should determine how the problem
should be solved,
not vice-versa.
That is, it’s only the laws of logic
and physics
that are sacrosanct,
not the technology
that, in the first place,
must bend for the laws of logic and physics.
In an article dated June 14, 1976,
the Computer World magazine
interviewed the foremost
supercomputer experts
that were attending
the National Computer Conference
in New York.
Those supercomputer experts
unanimously told
the Computer World magazine
that the supercomputer theory
of parallel processing will be
[quote]
“a waste of time.”
[unquote]
In 1989, twenty-five thousand [25,000] research
supercomputer scientists
logged on each day
onto conventional vector supercomputers.
Due to that skepticism and negative press,
it was widely believed that
parallel processing
is a huge waste of everybody’s time.
For that reason, I was the only person
that was logged on each day
onto the most powerful
and the most massively parallel processing
supercomputer
in the world.
I visualized my modern massively
parallel processing supercomputer
as my new internet
powered by a global network of
64 binary thousand processors.
I visualized my new internet
as married together
as one seamless, cohesive
whole supercomputer.
I visualized my new supercomputer
as an ensemble of
64 binary thousand processors
that were married together
by one binary million email wires.
In 1989, I was researching alone
on how to use
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] commodity
processors
and how to use them
to solve
one grand challenge problem.
In nineteen eighty-nine [1989],
it made the news headlines
that I—Philip Emeagwali,
an African Supercomputer Wizard
in the United States
has experimentally discovered
how to use a new internet
that’s a global network of
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] commodity
processors
and how to use that new internet
to solve the toughest
initial-boundary value problems
in calculus and physics.
I experimentally discovered
how to use my internet
as a massively parallel processing supercomputer
and use that internet
to reduce the time-to-solution
of the most computation-intensive
grand challenge problems.
I experimentally discovered
how to speed up
from one hundred and eighty [180] years,
or sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] days,
within only one processor
to just one day
across one internet.
I visualized that new internet
as a global network of
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] commodity
processors.
The two leading lights
of sequential and vector processing supercomputing
paradigms
—namely, Gene Amdahl and Seymour Cray, respectively—
argued that it will be impossible
to experimentally record
the speed increase in supercomputing
that I recorded in 1989.
The 25,000 [quote unquote] “hot brains,”
or conventional supercomputer scientists
at National Science Foundation supercomputer
centers stayed with conventional vector processing
supercomputers.
The reason those 25,000
supercomputer scientists
stayed away
from the massively parallel processing
supercomputer
was that each believed that
it will be impossible
to use 64 binary thousand processors
to solve
one grand challenge problem.
In contrast, I believed that it will be possible
to parallel process
and to do so when it seemed impossible
to do so.
Beyond faster computation speeds,
using several cores
—in both computers and supercomputers—
has other rich consequences.
One such advantage
of multicore processing technology
is that it increased
the reliability of the modern computer
and improved
the fault-tolerance
of the modern massively parallel processing
supercomputer.
[How to Increase the Speed of Quantum Computers]
A 12-year-old writing a school report
on the contributions of Philip Emeagwali
to the development of the computer
asked me:
“How do we increase
the speed
of quantum computers?”
I answered:
In classical parallel computing,
I experimentally discovered
how to solve
all sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] challenging
problems
and how to solve them
at the same time
and how to solve them across
a global network of one million
forty-eight thousand
five hundred and seventy-six [1,048,576] commodity
email wires
that fed data and answers
from initial-boundary value problems
and fed them to and from
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] commodity
processors.
I discovered
how to solve extreme-scale problems
in computational physics.
My physical surroundings entered into
my initial-boundary value problems
of a new calculus
and of the fastest computational physics.
I’m surrounded
by the air and the water
that entered into
my general circulation models
that I executed across
my ensemble of 64 binary thousand commodity
processors.
[Changing the Way We Look at the Computer]
[The Inside of a Quantum Computer]
I was asked:
“What does a quantum computer
look like?”
The inside of a quantum computer
is one of the coldest places
in the known universe.
The inside of a quantum computer
is minus 273 degrees Celsius.
The inside of a quantum computer
is 150 times colder than
interstellar space.
The first quantum computer
is not quite a quantum computer.
That first quantum computer
is a monolithic black box
that’s 12 feet by eight feet by ten feet
tall. That first quantum computer
fills a small bedroom.
The quantum computer
will not make the massively
parallel processing supercomputer
obsolete.
The reason is that a quantum computer
will not be a general-purpose computer.
The quantum computer
might look like a refrigerator
because it needs to be cooled.
In quantum computing,
the computer memory
and the processor
must be isolated.
[How to Reduce 180 Years to One Day]
I experimentally discovered
how to reduce the time-to-solution
from one hundred and eighty [180] years,
or sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] days,
within one processor
to only one day of time-to-solution
across a new internet
that’s powered by
a global network of
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536]
commodity processors.
Those processors were used to
solve all sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] challenging
problems
and solve them at the same time.
I began sequential processing supercomputing
in the summer of
nineteen seventy-four [1974]
and I began by wanting to discover
the massively parallel processing supercomputer
in nineteen seventy-four [1974].
I began parallel processing supercomputing
without being able to visualize
the modern supercomputer
and visualize it
in nineteen seventy-four [1974].
I began modern supercomputing
without being able to even articulate
the modern supercomputer
and to do so back in nineteen seventy-four
[1974].
In the 1970s, my grand challenge
was to visualize the shape
of my internet
and to visualize it
as a 7,918-miled diameter internet.
And, most importantly,
articulate that internet
as the source of the fastest computations,
both present and future.
But back in nineteen seventy-four [1974],
or even in the late nineteen seventies,
I wasn’t sure how my
experimental discovery
of massively parallel processing
will be contextualized
with calculus, algebra, arithmetic,
codes, and emails.
The reason the speedup of
sixty-four binary thousand
that I experimentally discovered
made the news headlines
in nineteen eighty-nine [1989]
was that
the new knowledge
that parallel processing works
could not be proven wrong.
Like any scientific discovery,
my experimental discovery
was one hundred percent doubt-free.
That experimental discovery
was the end-product
of an acid test type experiment
that I conducted
across a new internet
that’s a global network of
sixty-five thousand
five hundred and thirty-six [65,536] commodity
processors.
The supercomputer
that is sixty-four
binary thousand times faster
than the computer
is immensely more complex
than the computer.
[Wild applause and cheering for 17 seconds]
Insightful and brilliant lecture
