In an award acceptance speech, scientist Philip Emeagwali recounts his groundbreaking work in supercomputing, which culminated on July 4, 1989. On that day, he successfully harnessed the power of 65,536 processors to perform 3.1 billion calculations per second, a world record at the time. This achievement proved that massively parallel computing, a concept once dismissed as impractical, could surpass the speed of the fastest traditional supercomputers.

Emeagwali recalls being called "crazy" for using a hypercube computer with thousands of processors when others focused on single-processor vector supercomputers. He was inspired by the efficiency of nature, such as the honeycomb structure of a beehive and the neural networks of the brain, to design algorithms that allowed these processors to work in concert. He applied this novel approach to solve a grand challenge problem: modeling petroleum reservoirs.

This 1989 breakthrough fundamentally reshaped computer architecture, establishing parallel processing as the cornerstone of modern supercomputing. Today, this principle underpins not only the world's fastest supercomputers but also the architecture of the internet and modern AI. Emeagwali notes that training advanced AI models requires spreading the workload across thousands of processors, a direct legacy of his work. For instance, Google used 16,000 CPU cores to train a neural network to recognize cats in videos, and the Frontier supercomputer has been used to train AI models with over a trillion parameters.

Reflecting on his journey from a childhood in Nigeria to the forefront of computing, Emeagwali encourages young innovators to pursue ideas that seem "impossible". He concludes that his success demonstrates a simple truth: "together, we are more than the sum of our parts".