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]
[The Toughest Problem in Physics]
I’m Philip Emeagwali.
I know a lot about Philip Emeagwali
because I’m Philip Emeagwali.
Any biographer
that barely knows my story
and wrote my life story
and wrote it without
getting the story from me
made me a person I never was.
The sequential processing supercomputer,
that is the old computer,
was invented in 1946.
The parallel processing supercomputer,
that is the new computer,
was not invented in 1946.
The modern supercomputer,
that computes and communicates across,
more than ten million commodity processors
was experimentally discovered
at 10:15 in the morning NewYork Time
Tuesday the Fourth of July 1989,
the US Independence Day.
The experimental discovery
of parallel processing
made the news headlines back in 1989
and radically changed our understanding
of the computer.
For the four decades, onward of 1946,
the theorized ensemble
of millions of commodity processors
working together
as one cohesive supercomputer
that could solve the toughest problems
in extreme-scale computational physics
was dismissed as a beautiful theory
that lacked experimental confirmation.
On the Fourth of July 1989,
I made the first-ever
experimental discovery
of parallel processing computations
that is the world’s fastest computation
and that I executed across
a global network of
two-raised-to-power sixteen, or 65,536, commodity
processors
that were married together
by sixteen times as many commodity
email wires
and married together
as one seamless, cohesive supercomputer.
I visualized my global network
of two-to-power sixteen processors
as my new internet
that is embedded
in the sixteenth dimensional hyperspace.
Before the Fourth of July 1989,
looking at the precursor
to the modern parallel processing supercomputer
was like looking at the first wrist watch
that never ticked
and trying to figure out
what will make that first wrist watch
to start ticking for the first time.
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.
[What did Philip Emeagwali Invent?]
A 12-year-old American
researching her school report
asked:
“What did Philip Emeagwali invent?”
I answered:
I invented a new internet
that is a global network of
64 binary thousand commodity processors.
I visualized that internet
as encircling a globe
in a sixteen-dimensional hyperspace.
I also invented another internet
that is a global network of
commodity-off-the-shelf processors
that encircles a globe
in a three-dimensional space.
I invented
how to parallel process
across a new internet.
I experimentally discovered
how and why parallel processing
makes modern computers faster
and makes the new supercomputer
the fastest.
I invented
how to solve extreme-scale problems
in computational physics
and how to solve them across
a new internet.
My invention
of massively parallel processing
changed the way
we solve extreme-scale problems
in computational physics,
and changed it
from solving only one problem at a time
to massively communicating
and massively computing
and massively solving
millions of problems at once.
[Wild applause and cheering for 17 seconds]
Insightful and brilliant lecture
