Typically, oil is trapped within rocks underground which makes its removal difficult for oil companies. Engineers, able to recover only some 30 per cent of the oil in a reservoir, use computers to simulate oil fields so they can back oil's flow. Only 30 percent of oil can be recovered from the average oil field. Petroleum reservoir simulators, running on massively parallel computers, are X-ray machines that help the oil industry recover more oil. He developed equations to simulate movement of the black gold underground by modifying a set of equations developed by B.K. Risenkampf, a Russian mathematician in 1938.
Speed is the key to solving the equations.
Desk top personal computers would tackle in years, problems that a supercomputer can solve in a minute. Emeagwali's equations drastically speed up super computers designed like the connection machine. Using this new approach while putting in a 13-hour work day, Emeagwali's model rate at the speed of 3.1 billion calculations per second. With his extremely fast approach, petroleum reservoir simulation problems which formerly took may hours on conventional supercomputers, can now be solved in only a few seconds. The Connection Machine programmed by Emeagwali to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second .