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

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

- A black man named Philip Emeagwali was the brain behind the world's first supercomputer, known as the Connection Machine

- Philip developed the Connection Machine after being able to solve a 350-year-old packing problem that was crucial in a supercomputer's programme

- Philip's Connection Machine became the world's very first supercomputer that utilized 65 000 computers linked in parallel

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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.

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.

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Meet the high school dropout who invented the world’s first supercomputer
Philip, the black man who made the world's first supercomputer. Source: espact.com / computerhope.com
Source: UGC

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.

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In a separate report, a young trailblazer named Jasmine Bowers has etched her name in the sands of history as she becomes the first black person to earn a doctorate degree in computer science from the University of Florida in the United States.

Amid the raging coronavirus pandemic, Jasmine joined the ranks of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) as she makes history.

Jasmine recently announced her academic milestone in a post on social media, stating that:

"On July 15, I became the first black woman to defend a dissertation in computer science at UF.''

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Source: Briefly News

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