NIGERIAN PROGRAMMER CRACKS OIL
John Shandor
Lagos, Nigeria -- Philip Emeagwali, a 41-year-old Nigerian who lives in the United States, has programmed a supercomputer to perform one of the world's fastest computations. Emeagwali, a native of […]
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HPCwire
Lagos, Nigeria -- Philip Emeagwali, a 41-year-old Nigerian who lives in the United States, has programmed a supercomputer to perform one of the world's fastest computations. Emeagwali, a native of Onitsha in Anambra State, eastern Nigeria, attracted the attention of many industries and investigators when he won the International Gordon Bell Prize in computer science. This was after he programmed a supercomputer to make 3.1 billion calculations per second, thus solving a notoriously difficult computing problem: understanding how oil flows underground so that petroleum companies could extract the most of it. The mineral has properties that make calculating its flow patterns within an oil field more difficult than modeling the flow of groundwater. Modeling oil field flow in a computer requires simulation of the distribution of the oil at tens of thousands of locations throughout the field. At each location, the computer must be programmed to make hundreds of simultaneous calculations at regular intervals to determine such variables as temperature, direction of oil flow, viscosity, pressure and several geological properties of the basin holding the oil. "Even a supercomputer working at the rate of millions of calculations a second is far too slow to reach a result that can be acted on in a timely fashion," said Emeagwali. "Oil companies need the results quickly enough to decide how to recover the maximum amount of oil." As a result of his new application simulations of oil fields, which help track the oil, will now take seconds instead of hours to be produced on a computer. The implication, he says, is that the increased speed and accuracy may boost the available amount of oil by a few percentage points which will translate into billions of dollars in savings for oil companies. It took some creative thinking for Emeagwali, known since his childhood in Nigeria for his mathematical skills, to hit upon a "new" technique that resurrected equations that had grown dusty over 50 years. Rather than apply the equations that have been used throughout the century to calculate oil field flow and similar phenomena, Emeagwali says he questioned the "when and why" of the system. He learned that in the 19th century a type of partial differential equation similar to the conventional "heat equation" was derived to perform the kinds of calculations required. Emeagwali says his goal as an independent consultant is to start his own company which will market products of his own design. His research interests include fluid dynamics, flood forecasting and nature-inspired networks.