Philip Emeagwali

Beyond the Last Computer

2008-06-14T00:47:00Z

I felt the hard, cold steel of a gun against the back of my head. I spun around and saw my assailant’s finger shaking on the trigger: “Don't run or I'll shoot you,” he said. I was just 14 years old, and death was a stranger to me.

It was 1969, and Nigeria was embroiled in civil war. As a teenage refugee conscripted into the Biafran Army, I was forced at gunpoint to carry weapons to the Oguta front. It was a 24-hour, march through mosquito-infested mangroves flooded by the River Niger.

When the 30-month war ended on January 15, 1970, I was discharged and reunited with my parents. Together with one million returning refugees we walked for three days, avoiding landmines along fetid rainforest footpaths. Eventually, we reached our hometown of Onitsha. It was badly battered by the war.

There my thoughts returned to a love abandoned three years earlier—mathematical physics. This love affair blossomed when I was a refugee in Biafra, —shortly before July 20, 1969—the day man first walked on the moon. While running an errand, I stopped to gaze through a classroom window and saw a physics lecturer writing on a blackboard. It was Newton's Second Law of Motion: “Force equals mass times acceleration, or F=ma.”

Unaware that I had just been introduced to the most important law in physics, I was, nevertheless, awestruck. Newton’s Second Law of Motion is far more important than Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. “E equals MC squared” may be sexier on a T-shirt than “F=ma,” but Encarta lists the three laws of motion as the third most important scientific discovery of all time.

Three hundred and thirty years later, we still do not completely understand F=ma But it is the only formula that is integral to computing’s 20 grand challenges and mathematics’ seven millennium problems. I devoted many years devising a solution to one grand challenge. While conventional wisdom suggested it would be almost impossible to harness the power of 65,536 processors my grand challenge was to prove otherwise.

Initially, the challenge seemed deceptively simple; but in reality, there were so many different tiers of complexity that I sometimes forgot why I was programming those 65,536 processors. In hindsight, I did just about everything wrong before I finally got it right. Research is a high-risk game, but, as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

The complexity of the grand challenge renders it as incomprehensible to laypeople as pages of hieroglyphics or Greek symbols. Concisely, the challenge used the Second Law of Motion propagated along a virtual 16-dimensional hypercubic network to be executed by 65,536 processors. These processors are the beginning of the end. I started at the end because the end is devoid of the complex proofs and dense mathematical language that are unfathomable to non-mathematicians.

This grand challenge earned its name: it was a super problem that required one to think in ways that merge the laws of physics, logic, and numbers in 16-dimensional mathematical space, and to solve the problem by attacking it from three perspectives.

Walk with me as I tell a story that will take you from the Second Law of Motion to the blackboard, to the motherboard, to the mother of all motherboards: a one-of-a-kind computer powered by 65,536 processors. Every scientific discovery begins as a thought. The strategy for harnessing these laws of physics, logic, and numbers has to be conceived and thought out before becoming reality.

I visualized the grand challenge problem as a complex game with complex parameters, which I solved using three simple rules. First, I harnessed the power of processors to perform myriad computations. Second, I followed a minimum number of communication pathways to perform a minimum number of communications. Third, I enforced the Second Law of Motion in models of all that flows underneath the Earth.

In all, I had 65,536 processors and over one million pathways. The processors-plus-pathways make a computer a supercomputer, and a planet-sized supercomputer an Internet.

I have been asked: “What gave you the confidence to tackle one of computing’s grand challenges?” My answer — fifteen years of putting into practice the athlete’s five P mantra: Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.

In the 1980s, I was a mathematical physicist logged on 24/7 to a 65,536-brain supercomputer on think.com —the third registered dot com ever. It was an unpaid labor of love. I was tormented by self-doubt, a maniac who pushed his supercomputer to its breaking point.

Each one of us must learn to move outside our comfort zones. We learn with each step we take into the unknown. When I was five, my father discovered that I was slow in mathematics. He decided to teach me to solve 100 math problems in one hour. Thereafter, my ability to do rapid calculations earned me the nickname “Calculus” and set me on the path to become a supercomputer scientist who solved one of the most difficult problems in mathematics.

Crossing the frontiers of knowledge to conquer tomorrow’s grand challenges will demand revolutionary techniques. In my new technique, my 65,536 processors perform computations side by side, linked by 16 wires, each corresponding to the 16 sides of a 16-dimensional hypercube. This is the essence of “higher” mathematics: go beyond calculus and mine infinite dimensional spaces.

My multicolored drawings of the hypercube are a feast for the eye; programming them is a feast for the mind. The hypercubic circuitry of the supercomputer left me breathless. I was awestruck by its 16 unique information pathways coming from each processing node. Has there ever been any technology as gorgeously complicated as the hypercube supercomputer? For me, it was love at first sight. It was hypercubic elegance that engaged me emotionally, imaginatively and computationally.

One day, the Internet will become our shared planet-sized supercomputer and individuals will become nodes on the Internet and the Internet, as we know it, will become obsolete and “disappear” into our collective memory.

By definition, both the supercomputer and the Internet consist of connected nodes working in harmony. In fact, the supercomputer is more about communication than computation. The supercomputer and the Internet link computation and communication into a congruent whole - two complementary sides of a coin.

As the computer evolves into the supercomputer, and the supercomputer evolves into the Internet, and the Internet evolves into humanity, all that will remain will be a HyperBall superbrain - an electronic, organic Web 10,000 miles in diameter encompassing the Earth. The nodes will be people, embedded in an interconnected network of humanity working as one.

If history repeats itself, the supercomputer of today will become the ordinary computer of tomorrow. This core technology could evolve to become iconic, a masterpiece, a legacy, a legend, and a contribution to civilization. Each new “grand challenge” met becomes another beacon guiding humanity forward into the age of information.

Excerpted from a lecture delivered by Philip Emeagwali at the University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago on June 8, 2008.

Africa Must Produce or Perish

2008-05-29T20:51:00Z

Imagine that it is May 25, 2063, the 100th anniversary of Africa Day, a day for reflecting on Africa’s successes and failures. The newspaper headline announces, “Last Remaining Oilfield in West Africa’s American Territory Dries Up.”

The article continues: “The last patch of rainforest will soon be empty land scarred by oil pipelines, pumping stations, and natural gas refineries. Wholesale pollution will be the environmental legacy for future generations.

“Africa’s offshore oil reserves will ebb away. Abandoned oil wells could well become tourist attractions, and oil-boom settlements will be transformed into derelict ghost towns.

“In a world without oil, air travel will disappear, and people will voyage overseas on coal-powered ships. Farmers will use horses instead of tractors, and scythes instead of combine harvesters. As crops diminish and populations soar, famine will grip the globe. With no means to power their vehicles, parents will be housebound, without jobs, and children will walk to school.”

This scenario could become a reality, because we no longer have an abundant oil supply. We know oil exists in limited quantities and that most oil wells dry up after 40 years. It is as certain as death and taxes. Rather than debate the exact year when we will run out of oil, I prefer to imagine that we have already run out. It may come sooner than any of us expect. Our heirs will thank or curse us for how much oil we left for them. Instead of asking, “When will Africa run out of natural resources?” we should ask, “When will Africa be unable to export raw materials, either for lack of our own oil or because foreign markets have themselves dried up?”

A $100 bar of raw iron is worth $200 when forged into drinking cups in Africa, $65,000 when forged into needles in Asia, $5 million when forged into watch springs in Europe. How can this be? European intellectual capital – the collective knowledge of its people – allows a $100 raw iron bar to command a 50,000-fold increase! It could be said, therefore, that a lack of intellectual capital is the root cause of poverty.

Without African intellectual capital, iron excavated in Africa will continue to be manufactured in Europe and exported back to Africa at enormous cost. To alleviate poverty, Africa needs to cultivate creative and intellectual abilities that will allow it to increase the value of its raw materials and to break the continent’s vicious cycle of poverty. Poverty is not an absence of money, Rather, it results from an absence of knowledge.

In oil-exporting African nations, multinationals such as Shell (selling rigs for a 40% royalty on exported oil) are getting rich, while the oil rig workers remain poor. Instead of addressing the underlying causes of poverty – minimal productivity resulting from a lack of intellectual capital – Third World leaders have focused on giving false hope to their people.

We need less talk about poverty and more action to eliminate it. So how do we do this? Education has done more to reduce poverty than all the oil companies in the world. So it is disheartening to realize that few leaders believe that their people’s potential is far more valuable than what lies beneath the soil.

Intellectual capital, not higher wages, will eliminate poverty in Africa. If we all demand higher wages, we will end up paying the higher wages to ourselves. Intellectual capital will result in the creation of new products derived from new technologies. The end result will be not just a redistribution of wealth, but the creation and control of new wealth.

And Africa’s power to reduce poverty will open the floodgates of prosperity for millions of people. One catalyst for such prosperity could be telecommuting. If 300 million Africans could work for companies located in the West (just as millions of Indians do), then both regions would benefit. The strategy would be to recognize the labor needs of the global marketplace, and enable Africa to fulfill those needs.

For example, tax preparation experts living in Africa, where labor is cheaper, could fulfill the needs of US-based accountants. Furthermore, the time difference could allow for a fast turnaround in service. It is clear that knowledge and technology is crucial to alleviate Africa’s poverty.

Africa will perish if it continues to consume what it does not produce, and produce what it does not consume. The result will be a depressing cycle of increasing consumption, decreasing production, and increasing poverty. We are missing a golden opportunity by not using the trillion dollars earned by exporting natural resources to break Africa’s cycle of poverty.

We are at a crossroads where one signpost reads “Produce” and another reads “Perish.” We risk becoming like the driver who stops at an intersection and asks a pedestrian,

“Where does this road lead?”

And the pedestrian replies, “Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” the driver replies.

“Then it obviously doesn’t matter which road you take!” replies the pedestrian.

If we adopt the same attitude as the driver, Africa will have lost its chance to “choose” its future.

For decades, power in post-colonial Africa rested in the hands of those with guns, not those with brains. We were not always at war with our neighbors, but we were always at war with poverty. And we spent more on guns than on books and bread.

Africa’s choice is clear: produce or perish. However, it is important that we do not blindly choose the lesser of two evils – producing what we cannot consume or consuming what we cannot produce. We can avoid this. My wish is that by the end of the 21st century high-end products in New York City will sport the label: “Made in Africa.”

We cannot look forward to our future until we learn from our past. Five thousand years of recorded history reveal that technology was ancient Africa’s gift to the modern world. Forty and a half centuries ago, geometers in Africa’s Nile Valley region designed the Great Pyramid of Giza, the last of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. That man-made mountain remains the largest stone building on Earth. It is an icon of engineering, and testifies that Africa was once the world’s most technologically advanced region.

It is absolutely imperative that Africa regain its technological prominence, which will enable it to produce what the world can consume. When we do that, Africa will finally be eating the fruits of its own labor. When Africa has regained its technological prominence, the world’s leaders will seek it out. And, like a rainforest renewed, Africa will flourish again.