African Heritage Month

[patrici...@my-dejanews.com]

African American history is American history. Check out Philip Emeagwali's
speech posted at http://emeagwali.com celebrating the contributions of African
Americans to American history.

Enjoy,
Patricia Turner

THIS MAN IS HOT!!!!

Supercomputers that put men on the moon are unheard of in
Africa. But not to this Nigerian lad who dropped out of school
at age 14. Now a ripe 41-year-old, Philip Emeagwali is turning
the American supercomputer and oil industries upside down,
and the Americans can't believe it! Baffour Ankomah talked to
him in his home in St. Paul, Minnesota, USA.

Philip Emeagwali is not a normal Nigerian. Even
after amassing degrees in five different fields, his
name still comes bald with no attachments - not
even a mere Dr.

Coming from a country where even engineers
(Engineer Ololo) and other lesser mortals (Dr Mrs
Chief Alhajia Olusoga; Ambassador Baba Kuti)
prefix their names with a chaotic mix of titles,
Emeagwali's eschewal of the national fixation shows
why, in the words of the American magazine
Michigan Today, he is "one of the world's fastest
humans."

In 1989 he became the first man on earth to
perform the world's fastest computer computation -
a staggering 3.1 billion calculations per second. That
surpassed even the theoretical peak speed of the
more expensive supercomputers costing between
$10m and $30m a piece then in use in the US.

Philip Emeagwali sits in front of the Connection
Machine with which he made his
record-breaking 3.1 billion per second
calculation that changed the global oil industry

Emeagwali's achievement also helped solve one of
America's 20 Grand Challenges --- understanding
how oil flows underground so companies could
extract the most of the "black gold."

Emeagwali's breakthrough won him the prestigious
Gordon Bell Prize in the US. Though worth only
$1,000 in cash and awarded by the American
Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers,
the Gordon Bell is considered to be the Nobel Prize
of computing.

Pure Genius

Emeagwali captured it while making mince-meat of
the previous winners' efforts. His 3.1 billion
calculations per second was twice the speed
achieved by the 1988 winner and 24 times faster
than the 1987 winner. And what's more - he was
the first solo winner of the award. Usually, teams
from corporations and national laboratories capture
the $1,000 cheque. But Emeagwali, a "novice" by
American computing standards at the time he
started his project, spent only eight months on a
relatively new type of computer - the Connection
Machine - before clinching the award.

The Nigerian embassy in Washington milked the
applause:

"By this great accomplishment," Dr
Hamzat Ahmadu the then Nigerian
ambassador in Washington wrote to
Philip, "you have shown the world that,
contrary to many negative press
[reports] that tend to portray the
generality of Nigerians in bad light
particularly in the USA, Nigerians are
capable of achieving greatness and do
indeed excel in many fields. I hope that
other Nigerians both within and outside
your community will emulate you and
set similar high standards of
excellence."

This is what Nigerians at home call "reaping where
you've not sown." For, Emeagwali achieved his
greatness without any help from the Nigerian
government.

At age 14, Philip dropped out of school in Onitsha
where he grew up because his father, James, (a
nurse) could not pay his school fees.

Philip, an Ibo born at Akure in Yorubaland, was the
first of his father's nine children. The Nigerian
government, despite all the oil money, did not help
the poor boy to continue his education.

But before he dropped out of school, Philip had
shown a clear head for mathematics. His father
James was so encouraged that he continued to
teach him mathematics in the evenings. Philip was
such a mathematical genuis that his mates soon
nicknamed him "Calculus." Even his father, the
evening teacher, could not keep up with him. "He
gave up because he said I knew more than he did,"
Philip told New African.

Having dropped out of school, Philip made the
public library his second home where, through
library books, he taught himself college-level
mathematics, physics, chemistry and English. He
studied hard and passed his GCE from the
University of London with ease.

The American Dream

Luck smiled on him when he was 17. He won a
scholarship to the Oregon State University in the
US where he majored in mathematics. He had
arrived in Oregon wide-eyed in 1974, not knowing
what the future held for him. But he has since
earned four other degrees - a PhD in Scientific
Computing from the University of Michigan; two
Masters Degrees from the George Washington
University, one in Ocean and Marine Engineering
and the other in Civil and Environmental
Engineering. He has another Masters Degree in
Applied Mathematics from the University of
Maryland.

His working life has seen him in Maryland and
Wyoming as a civil engineer, and as a computer
scientist at the US National Weather Service for
which he wrote a thesis on mathematical
calculations used in forecasting floods. He also
worked at the US Army High Performance
Computing Research Centre in Minneapolis from
1991 to 1993.

He has since won several awards including the
Scientist of the Year Award 1991 given by the
National Society of Black Engineers in the US ("in
recognition of his outstanding contribution to the
scientific field which benefitted all mankind"); the
Computer Scientist of the Year Award 1993 given
by the National Technical Association; and the
Pioneer of the Year Award 1996, again given by
the National Society of Black Engineers.

Greatest Achievement

But Emeagwali's greatest achievement to date is his
1989 breakthrough in making scientists better
understand how oil flows underground.

The project was for his doctoral dissertation.
Instead of using one supercomputer which cost
$30m a pop and uses eight high-powered
processors, the Nigerian resorted to the Internet to
access 65,536 smaller computers each working in
parallel on a small part of the problem.

"The result was phenomenal: a computer that
performed computations more than three times
faster than a supercomputer," wrote Marsha Lakes
Matyas for the American Association for the
Advancement of Science.

Emeagwali was estactic: "I like to work on
problems that are important to society because you
get satisfaction," he told New African. "Research is
hard work, so you might as well work on important
research".

He tells how he did it.

"The Connection Machine had only been developed
in 1986, three years before my breakthrough, and it
had a poor reputation. People were sceptical about
the Machine and denigraded it because, typically,
researchers needed a year to learn how to use it and
its software was scarce.

The Connection Machine

"I was one of the first persons crazy enough to try
it. I'm more confident in pursuing ideas that are not
very well accepted. It has something to do with my
personality. If everyone goes east, I go west, so I
will be the first to find the solution." But not many
believed in what he was doing.

"To be really honest, I thought he was getting
caught between the cracks," confessed Trevor
Mudge, Director of the Advanced Computer
Architecture Laboratory at the University of
Michigan where Emeagwali studied.

But the Nigerian knew what he was doing. He
linked up 65,536 processors - each comparable to a
desk top computer - via the Internet to the
Connection Machine. He figured that more points
would provide better results.

He says: "Just picture the conventional
supercomputer, costing $30m each, as eight oxen
pulling a cart and the Connection Machine as about
65,000 chickens pulling the same cart.

"The old thinking is that the oxen will do a better
job, but if the chickens coordinate their efforts,
they'll do a better job than the oxen. That's what
my 65,536 small computers achieved: 3.1 billion
calculations per second. The supercomputer was
nowhere in sight with all its $30m purchase price."

20 Grand Challenges

In the US, the government has a list of the 20
most difficult problems in science and engineering
called the 20 Grand Challenges. One of them is
petroleum reservior simulation. Emeagwali wanted
to crack this.

He explains: "Oil is usually found underground,
trapped in rocks. Until my experiment, en-gineers
were able to recover only about 10% of the oil in
any reservior by using supercomputers to simulate
oil fields and track the oil flow.

I chose this problem because in this field, in order
to have the most impact, you have to work on the
most serious problems." Coming from Nigeria, he
knew that an oil field was not just a huge
underground cave.

"Oil is found in pores within rocks," he continues,
"and oil companies must pump gas or water into
fields to force the oil to nearby wells.

Seismic survey in the Niger Delta

"But if the oil is sucked out too quickly at one well,
then oil elsewhere may not flow naturally to the
same well and is virtually trapped. The company
must then drill another well at considerable expense
to extract the trapped oil.

"The money involved is staggering. That's why I set
myself to understand the flow within oil fields and
how many barrels can be removed at any one well".

To help him overcome the problem, Emeagwali
looked elsewhere. He knew that in the early 1930s,
the German mathematician Paul Fillunger had
formulated a theory on partial differential equations.

But Fillunger was not "successful." A sceptical
panel of experts publicly announced in March 1937
that the German had failed to solve the equations.
Fillunger felt so humiliated that he and his wife
committed suicide. After their deaths, the Russian
mathematician B. K Risenkampf seized on
Fillunger's idea, but he too was only able to partially
solve the equations. But Philip Emeagwali showed
in 1989 that Fillunger's original equations were
correct.

He modified Fillunger's equations on his computer
and then divided the simulated oil field into eight
million points, assigning 128 points to each of the
65,536 processors linked to the Connection
Machine.

Emeagwali in front of the partial differential
equations that won him the Gordon Bell in 1989

He had written his programme to instruct each point
in the 65,536-chain to talk with six neighbours
simultaneously. The results were phenomenal!

The Breakthrough

if he were Archimedes, the great Greek
mathematician, he would have run out of his bath
shouting "eureka, eureka" (I've found it, I've found
it).

But Emeagwali was Nigerian. When the Connection
Machine popped up the results, his eyes went wild!
He screamed and punched the air. He had achieved
3.1 billion calculations per second! And not only
that: His calculations had determined the amount of
oil in the simulated oil field, its direction of flow and
speed at each point.

For the entire oil field, (all eight million points), his
calculations had taken one-sixth of a second, which
mimicked a few hours of actual oil flow. one of
America's 20 Grand Challenges had been solved -
by a Nigerian who dropped out of school at age 14!

"When he told me the results, I thought he had
made a mistake," says William Martin, Director of
the University of Michigan's Laboratory for
Scientific Computation where Emeagwali spent 13
hours a day for eight months working on the
project.

It was enough to win him the Gordon Bell Prize.

Said the Gordon Bell Committee: "The amount of
money at stake is staggering. For example, you can
typically expect to recover 10% of a field's oil. If
you can improve your production schedule to get
just 1% more oil, you will increase your yield by
$400m (at $20 per barrel in a 20-billion-barrel
field)".

Emeagwali's breakthrough made this possible. It
changed the view of a sceptical petroleum industry
that massively parallel computers could be used to
recover more oil. Today, seven years on, 10% of
all massively parallel computers are purchased by
the oil industry alone. And the speed of
Emeagwali's calculations are helping the OPEC
nations to extract more oil and increase their oil
revenue.

Since the breakthrough, Emeagwali has gone from
strength to strength. In March this year, he was
adjudged the Pioneer of the Year by the National
Society of Black Engineers in the US. The award
was presented to him at a ceremony in Nashville,
Tennesse, attended by 6,000 international scientists
and engineers. It is the most prestigious recognition
bestowed by the Society on individuals whose
"intellectual contributions have benefitted all
mankind."

Emeagwali was cited for his "discoveries and
inventions that led to the acceptance of massively
parallel computing technology, and in particular
their use in the petroleum industry to recover more
oil." The award greatly pleased Emeagwali as he got
it ahead of other eminent scientists and engineers
like the US-based Ghanaian Dr Thomas Mensah
who is currently leading the design of advanced
laser-guided weapons (also known as Smart
Weapons) such as the US Patriot missiles which
became famous during the Gulf War.

Dr Mensah holds seven patents in fiber optics -
three in fiber optics guided missile technolgy, and
four in manufacturing fiber optics inexpensively
which, experts say, will impact hugely on the use of
fax machines, electronic banking and other
communications gadgetry.

Despite the fame, Philip Emeagwali is not resting on
his oars. This April, he presented a 819-page
description of a revolutionary hyperball computer
to the US Office of Patents and Trademarks. His
new computer will enable scientists to better
understand the long-term effects of greenhouse
gases and global warming.

Revolutionary Invention

Emeagwali's new revolutionary hyperball
computer network was based on the theory of
tesselated models. Each red dot represents a
processor and each red line represents the path
used in sending and receiving information
between the processors.

He based the new computer on the "theory of
tessellated models" which he formulated himself.
This theory demonstrates that tessellations (sphere
packings) and fast parallel computations are related
fields.

16 Processor Hypertree Computer Network

Parallel computers in use today are based on the
hypercube or hypertree networks which do not map
efficiently over the Earth's surface. Emeagwali's
hyperball is different. It was inspired by the
complex geometries and patterns he observed in
nature - the arrangements of molecules in crystals
and the structure of bee's honeycombs.

16 Processor Hypertree Computer Network

His invention divides the Earth's atmosphere into
sections that simulate a bee's honeycomb. Bees, he
says, use the most efficient method to construct
their honeycombs, so a computer network which
emulated the honeycomb will be more efficient and
powerful in forecasting the world's weather patterns
a century or more ahead of time.

Emeagwali's Tessellation

"At the moment, there is no computer that can do
this. My hyperball will make this possible," he says.

Hot Stuff

Married to an African-American microbiologist,
Dale Brown, who has borne him a 6-year-old son,
Emeagwali is enjoying his days in St Paul,
Minnesota. He is an Internet freak - his personal
Website (http://emeagwali.com) is so hot that it is
accessed by 800 people a day from all over the
world.

Dale and Philip Emeagwali

"They like to know more about my work, and I do
my best not to disappoint them, he says. "But I
would be happier when Africa finally gets
connected to the information superhighway through
the proposed Africa ONE project. I can't wait for
that day."

Reported in the July/August 1996 issue of New
African (London, England).

Philip Emeagwali can be reached at
500-437-2330 or
phi...@emeagwali.com

African American history is American history. Check out Philip Emeagwali's
speech posted at http://emeagwali.com celebrating the contributions of African
Americans to American history.

Enjoy,
Patricia Turner

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