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]
[Research Philosophy of Philip Emeagwali]
The difference
between the other research physicists,
research mathematicians,
and research computer scientists,
and myself—Philip Emeagwali,
that was a massively parallel processing
supercomputer scientist—
was that those researchers were plowing
the frontier of computational physics
or the frontier of modern calculus
or the frontier of abstract algebra
or the frontier of the vector processing supercomputer.
Most research supercomputer scientists
of the 1970s and ‘80s
were plowing frontiers of knowledge
that had already been plowed.
As a massively parallel processing supercomputer
scientist
of the 1970s and ‘80s,
I did not believe in re-plowing
the frontier of knowledge
of the sequential processing supercomputer
or in re-plowing
the frontier of knowledge
of the vector processing supercomputer
that had already been plowed.
Re-plowing
the frontiers of scientific knowledge
that had already been plowed
makes as little difference
as searching for new crude oil and natural
gas
in the Oloibiri Oil Field
of Bayelsa State of Nigeria.
The Oloibiri Oil Field
was the first oilfield discovered
in West Africa.
The Oloibiri Oil Field
dried up after twenty years
of oil exploration
and was abandoned back in 1978.
Comparing the new massively
parallel processing supercomputer technology
to the old vector processing
supercomputer technology
was like comparing
constructing a brand new highway
from Cairo (Egypt, North Africa)
through Lagos (Nigeria, West Africa)
that is 95 hours of non-stop driving
of six and half thousand kilometers
and constructing that brand new highway
to Johannesburg (South Africa)
that is 98 hours of non-stop driving
of nearly 7,000 kilometers
from Lagos (Nigeria)
and comparing
that super highway construction project
to the superficial re-paving
of the existing half an hour drive,
45 kilometer highway
between my ancestral hometown
of Onitsha (Nigeria) and Awka (Nigeria).
That is the reason
the massively parallel processing supercomputer
costs the budget of a small nation.
Since the first sequential processing supercomputer
was invented in 1946,
the price-performance of the supercomputer
dropped continuously and exponentially.
If that pace of technological progress upholds,
the supercomputer of today
will become the computer of tomorrow.
On the Fourth of July 1989,
I—Philip Emeagwali—entered into
the history book.
I was profiled in books
such as the one that was titled:
“History of the Internet.”
I am the subject of school reports
because I experimentally discovered
a new way of looking at the
modern computer.
The June 20, 1990 issue
of The Wall Street Journal
recorded that I experimentally discovered
a new paradigm,
called massively parallel processing supercomputing.
That new paradigm in supercomputing
changed how we compute
and changed how we solve
the toughest problems
in modern calculus
and extreme-scale computational physics.
That new paradigm
changed how we solve
the system of partial differential equations
that governs
initial-boundary value problems
of modern mathematics,
such as general circulation modeling
to foresee otherwise unforeseeable
climate changes.
That new paradigm
changed how we solve
the toughest problems
in extreme-scale computational physics
and changed how we solve
those problems in parallel
and changed how we solve
those problems
at the fastest supercomputer speeds.
I was asked:
“What makes a discovery or an invention
newsworthy?”
I answered that,
first and foremost, the new knowledge
that is embodied
within the scientific discovery
or within the technological invention
must compete with new celebrity gossips
and new hot button political
and religious issues.
For those reasons, a newsworthy contribution
to human knowledge
must be bold and strange,
or be a new paradigm,
such as be the invention
of the massively parallel processing supercomputer
that solves the toughest problems
in extreme-scale computational physics
and solves them
in an unorthodox manner
that challenges expectations.
Discovering a new paradigm
in supercomputing
prompts the leaders of thought
in the world of computers
to ask for the discoverer’s
telephone number.
That’s how and why Steve Jobs
got my telephone number
and contacted me in about June 1990.
Back in the 1970s and ‘80s,
parallel processing was ridiculed, mocked,
and rejected
as a beautiful theory
that lacked experimental confirmation.
Today, we take it for granted
that the modern massively
parallel processing supercomputer
harnesses the total computing power
of up to ten million
six hundred and forty-nine thousand
six hundred [10,649,600]
commodity-off-the-shelf processors
that are identical.
But to Steve Jobs my invention
of the parallel processing supercomputer
was like science fiction
becoming non-fiction.
[Wild applause and cheering for 17 seconds]
Insightful and brilliant lecture
