Science, Medicine & Engineering
Landmark
Philip Emeagwali
born 1954
Gordon Bell Prize for supercomputing, 1989
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Nigeria Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
He won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989 for using a massively parallel machine to model petroleum reservoirs — a landmark in the argument that many cheap processors could beat a few expensive ones.
Philip Emeagwali was born at Akure and his schooling was interrupted by the Biafran war, during which he was conscripted into the Biafran army as a teenager and spent time in a refugee camp. He completed his education by correspondence and self-study, passed the University of London's general certificate examination, and won a scholarship to the United States at seventeen.
In 1989 he was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize, the principal award in high-performance computing, for work that used the Connection Machine — a system with 65,536 processors — to model the flow of oil and gas through a petroleum reservoir, reaching a sustained performance of around 3.1 billion calculations per second. The significance was architectural: it was among the demonstrations that a large number of inexpensive processors working in parallel could outperform a small number of powerful ones on real scientific problems, which is how essentially all supercomputing has been done since.
He has been among the most widely cited African scientists in the popular press, particularly across the continent and in the diaspora, and was named in a Nigerian poll as the greatest African scientist of all time. Some claims that have circulated about him — that he invented the internet, or that the prize was for its architecture — are exaggerations that did not originate in the citation, and the record of the Gordon Bell Prize itself is the sound basis for his standing.
In 1989 he was awarded the Gordon Bell Prize, the principal award in high-performance computing, for work that used the Connection Machine — a system with 65,536 processors — to model the flow of oil and gas through a petroleum reservoir, reaching a sustained performance of around 3.1 billion calculations per second. The significance was architectural: it was among the demonstrations that a large number of inexpensive processors working in parallel could outperform a small number of powerful ones on real scientific problems, which is how essentially all supercomputing has been done since.
He has been among the most widely cited African scientists in the popular press, particularly across the continent and in the diaspora, and was named in a Nigerian poll as the greatest African scientist of all time. Some claims that have circulated about him — that he invented the internet, or that the prize was for its architecture — are exaggerations that did not originate in the citation, and the record of the Gordon Bell Prize itself is the sound basis for his standing.
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