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The success that Nigerian-born computer scientist Philip Emeagwali (b. 1954) has had in designing computers that solve real-world problems has been fueled by his willingness to reach beyond established paradigms and draw inspiration for his designs from nature. In the 1980s, Emeagwali achieved breakthroughs in the design of parallel computer systems. Whereas supercomputers worked sequentially, they were too slow and inefficient to accurately predict such extremely complex movements.
To model oil field flow using a computer requires the simulation of the distribution of the oil at tens of thousands of locations throughout the field. At each location, hundreds of simultaneous calculations must be made at regular time intervals relating to such variables as temperature, direction of oil flow, viscosity, and gather and broadcast the largest quantity of messages to its processing points in the shortest time.
In 1996 Emeagwali had another breakthrough when he presented the design for a massively parallel computer that he claims will be powerful enough to predict global weather patterns a century in advance. The computer’s design is based on the geometry of bees’ honeycombs, which use an extremely efficient three-dimensional spacing. Emeagwali believes understand the systems evolved by nature and, thereby, to facilitate the evolution of human technology.
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