Philip Emeagwali's video: Why Steve Jobs Took Interest in My Supercomputing Breakthrough Inventors and their Inventions

I'm @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. Philip Emeagwali 180913 1 5 of 7