Philip Emeagwali Supercomputer

1        What is Philip Emeagwali Famous For?

1.1.1.1      The Hero’s Quest

At 8:15 on the morning
of the Fourth of July 1989,
the U.S. Independence Day,
I saw something
that had never been seen before.
By seeing something
where nothing existed,
the discoverers and inventors

made darkness visible.
The inventor
embarked upon a hero’s quest
to hear something
that was previously unheard;
to see something
that was previously unseen;

and to understand something
that was previously misunderstood.

Trying to understand an invention
without the life story of its inventor
is like looking at an embroidery
from the wrong side of the cloth.

 

1.1.1.2      The Eureka Moment!

On that U.S. Independence Day,
in Los Alamos, New Mexico, United States,
I made the first experimental measurement
of the world’s fastest computation
ever recorded across
an ensemble of processors
that is a new internet.
That invention
represents a new way
of looking at the computer.
To be the first
is a greater achievement
than to be number one
or to be the fastest.
There’s only one first
but they will be many fastest.
I was the first to discover that
parallel processing across
an ensemble of the slowest processors
is faster than sequentially processing
only on the fastest processor,
or doing so only on the fastest supercomputer.
Back in 1989,
it was my most pleasurable experience
to be the first-person-ever
to stand at the farthest frontier
of human knowledge
and see
the massively parallel processing
supercomputer
that is the precursor
to the modern computer.
On the night of the Fourth of July 1989,
I had a powerful, unsettling dream.
I woke up with the visceral feeling
that I had permanently entered
into the history book
and into school reports.

1.1.1.3      Philip Emeagwali Invention

I witnessed the birth cry
of a new computer
that is a new supercomputer
that is a new internet
that is outlined
as a new global network of
65,536 tightly-coupled processors
that were identical and equal distances apart.
Each processor operates
its own operating system.

Each processor
has its own dedicated memory
that shares nothing with each other.
I trembled because I saw a supercomputer
that no human had ever seen before.
I saw an ensemble
of the slowest processors
in the world
outperform the fastest supercomputer
in the world.
I got goose bumps
and my hairs stood on end
while I watched my invention unfold.
Seeing, for the first time ever,
the slowest processors compute together
to compute faster than
the fastest supercomputer
was the most amazing experience
in my life.

Banquet speaker at Jamaica Medical Foundation’s gala fundraising banquet at the Hilton Kingston Hotel. Photo taken on March 24, 2001.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipemeagwali/41255906990/sizes/o/

1.1.1.4      The Paradigm Shift

I trembled because I was witnessing
the birth of a new era
in the history of the computer.
I trembled because I was witnessing
a paradigm shift
in the supercomputer world.
I trembled because I was witnessing
a change of tectonic proportions
that will forever affect the way
our distant descendants of Year Million
will think about their version of the computer.
I trembled because my dreams
and my illusions had become reality.
I got goose bumps because
I was gazing across the centuries
and into one thousand millennia.
That Fourth of July 1989
marked the moment
we changed the way we looked at
the modern supercomputer
and changed the technology
from an old computer
that computed with only one electronic brain
to a never-before-seen supercomputer
that executes the fastest computations
and compute them across
a never-before-seen internet
that was outlined by millions upon millions
of electronic brains.
That Fourth of July 1989
marked the moment
when for the first time ever
an ensemble of the slowest processors
computed together
and computed as one seamless, cohesive unit
and computed faster than
the fastest supercomputer.
For me, Philip Emeagwali,
that Fourth of July 1989
was a day of fire,
the day the massively parallel processing supercomputer
became the fire we can’t put out.
After my discovery on that day,
trying to stop the acceptance of
the massively parallel processing
supercomputer
became like trying to stop midnight.
I experimentally discovered
that using only one processor
to solve the toughest problems
arising in extreme-scale
computational physics
was like putting the wings
of a jet aircraft
upon an ocean liner.

My paradigm shift
was from computing in the singular
to both simultaneously computing
and communicating
in the plural senses.

1.1.1.5      Benefits of Philip Emeagwali Supercomputer

The need to calculate
is as old as humanity.
The need to compute
existed because it is central to
human existence.
On the Fourth of July 1989,
I witnessed the unveiling
to the human race
of a new understanding of the words ‘computer’
and ‘supercomputer.’
As an aside, the Latin equivalence
of the word “computer”
was first used in print
two thousand years ago.
The word “computer”
was first used by the Roman author
Pliny the Elder.
The word “supercomputer”
was coined in 1967.
I believe that our children’s children
will coin a new word
for their supercomputers.
I believe that our children’s children
will invent supercomputers
that are science fiction to us.
I discovered that
inventing a new technology
creates a need for a new vocabulary
and a new narrative
for the histories of science
and technology.