In February, he won the prestigious 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for programming supercomputers to work faster than ever before and for helping to solve one of the nation's toughest oil recovery problems. U-M graduate student Philip Emeagwali speeds supercomputer to solve oil recovery problems. You have to walk by yourself, and it can be isolating. Now more and more people are wanting to walk with me. Cray Research Inc. Philip Emeagwali's program drove a Thinking Machines computer to 3.1 billion calculations per second in simulating flow within an oil field.
Oil usually is found underground, trapped in rocks.
Engineers, able to recover only about 30 percent of the oil in a reservoir, use computers to simulate oil fields and track oil's flow. They're like space-age divining rods, and they'll operate much more swiftly and accurately as a result of Emeagwali's work. I wanted to work on something useful. His interest in parallel computations led him to choose the Connection Machine for his research because it uses 65,000 processors working simultaneously on calculations. It is radically different from conventional supercomputers, which use eight high-powered processors.