Meet the Nigerian high school dropout who invented world’s 1st supercomputer

Meet the high school dropout who invented world’s 1st supercomputer

August 21, 2020 7:38 AM

Philip Emeagwali, a black man of Nigerian descent who was born in 1954 and is nearly 66 years old, was responsible for building the world's first supercomputer that provided amazing results.

Meet the high school dropout who invented world’s 1st supercomputer

According to a report by blackhistory.com, Philip's intentioned was termed the Connection Machine which happened in 1989 after he got a brainwave to develop a programme that solved a 350-year-old packing problem with similar systems.

The packing problem was, at the time, considered to be one of the greatest unsolved mathematics problems.

Philip's Connection Machine became the world's very first supercomputer that utilised 65 000 computers linked in parallel to form the fastest computer on earth. It was able to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second, which was faster than the theoretical top speed of the now-popular Cray Supercomputer.

The brilliant black man, who is also known by his schoolmates as 'Calculus', won the Gordon Bell Prize in 1989 for developing high-performance computing applications that used computational fluid dynamics for oil-reservoir modelling.

Source: Briefly.co.za

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