I’m Philip Emeagwali. The fundamental problem of supercomputing was to discover how to solve the toughest problems arising in mathematics, science, and engineering. And to discover how to solve those grand challenge problems across an ensemble of processors that were identical to each other and that shared nothing between each other with each processor operating its own operating system. The latter was the biggest scientific question in the unknown world of the supercomputer. The concrete, measurable, and visible proof that I was in the terra incognita, or in the unexplored territory, of the supercomputer
was that it made the news headlines
that I experimentally
parallel processed and communicated across a new internet.
After my invention
of practical parallel processing,
I became well known
but not known well.
That is, many knew Philip Emeagwali
as an inventor
but few understood his invention.
It’s easier to recognize my face
than to understand
my abstract contributions
to mathematics, physics,
and computer science.
Who is Philip Emeagwali?
I am the computational mathematician
that contributed
to a greater understanding
of how to execute the fastest
floating-point calculations of arithmetic.
I am the research mathematician
who figured out how to solve
the largest system of equations
of algebra
that must be solved
to discover and recover
otherwise elusive
crude oil and natural gas.
I am the mathematician
that invented
new partial differential equations
of the calculus of extreme-scaled petroleum reservoir simulation.
For those reasons, I said that
I am well known
as a supercomputer scientist
that contributed
to the development of the computer
but I am not known well
as a mathematician
that contributed to mathematics.
It’s easier to understand that
I contributed to the modern computer
or to the modern supercomputer
that’s an internet
than to understand my contributions
to computational mathematics
and even computational physics.
Most people think calculus
is difficult to understand.
The invention
of the fastest computer
is easier to recall
than the invention
of the most advanced expression
in calculus
that, in turn, is the recurring decimal
in nearly all the workloads
of supercomputers.
School Reports on Philip Emeagwali
A 12-year-old writing
a school inventor report
on Philip Emeagwali
cannot explain to her teacher
how the new nine
partial differential equations
that I contributed to calculus
is more accurate
than the previous equations
in textbooks.
On the other hand,
she could explain my contributions
to the development of the supercomputer
that is a new internet.
The technology called
practical parallel processing
that I discovered
on the Fourth of July 1989
was called a grand challenge
for a good reason.
Because it was a once-impossible problem
that was in the realm of science-fiction
the machinery was abandoned
by 25,000 supercomputer scientists
that were only at home
with scalar and/or vector processing.
I was the only full time programmer
of the 1980s
that was at the frontier
of the most massively parallel supercomputers.
In the 1980s, attempting to harness
64 binary thousand processors
and to use them to solve
the biggest scientific challenges
evoked a sense of foreboding.
In the 1980s, harnessing
one billion processors—that defined
and outlined
a massively parallel supercomputer
—and using them to solve
a grand challenge problem
was as science fiction
as sending an astronaut to planet Mars.
WHY I PARALLEL PROCESSED ALONE
In the 1980s, to parallel process
a grand challenge problem
was to make the impossible-to-solve
initial-boundary value problem
of calculus and physics
possible-to-solve
as a discretized problem
in large-scale algebra.
The reason I parallel processed alone
was that I was the only person
with the confidence to do so.
In the 1970s and ‘80s,
practical parallel supercomputing
across a new internet
that was a new global network of
65,536 processors
was like shooting at as many birds
in the dark.
I parallel processed
to discover speeds in computation
and communication
that were previously unseen,
and that made the news headlines
in 1989.
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