Justin Rattner, Intel CTO, announced in his address to the conference today that HPC needs a Killer App, and he believes that app will be the 3D Internet.

(Looking ahead: on Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore will address the conference. We think it’s possible he may mention global warming – and in fact, according to Press Room rumor, he’s going to reveal proof that the Earth will spontaneously combust sometime this millenium. Is that what the 2012 fuss is all about? We’ve also seen more climate visualizations than we ever thought possible – including one that seemed to show the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Oregon actually boiling. Questioning revealed that the angry red color wasn’t actually all that hot, and that it was ‘simulated’ data not even connected with a real climate model. Maybe scary models get more show traffic…)

But back to the topic at hand… GCG is always looking for the business rationale, and Rattner provided that up front: The growth curve for HPC out to 2013 looks pretty flat and scary. A rate of 3.6% is just not going to cut it; we have to break out of our rut and think of HPC in a different way, and if we don’t, we’re in for tough times. Thus, we need a high-volume market to “trickle up” into HPC.

Enter the 3D Web, where simulations are never-ending and have no “walls” – your World of Warcraft avatar can jump into Call of Duty, for example. Several onstage guests demonstrated the business and research benefits of this concept. Shenlei Winkler, CTO at the Fashion Research Institute, spoke about the savings in design time (75%) and physical samples (65%) provided by sending 3D sketches to overseas garment factories. One day, in fact, consumers may be able to collaborate with designers to make real-time changes in color, fabric, etc., but we’re not there yet: right now, the simulation we saw of cloth draping over an object and cascading onto the floor took 6 minutes of compute time per frame. To bring these processes to real-time, we need… processing power! (Lest you’ve forgotten, Mr. Rattner is the CTO at Intel.)

Yes, we already have virtual worlds, but they don’t have inter-operability. The HPC community can bring order to the chaos, Rattner believes, by joining 3D Web + the cloud in endeavors such as  ‘OpenSim’, an open source simulation environment being developed at UC Irvine.

Rattner’s closing call to action was to emphasize that it’s time to apply HPC skills plus cloud skills – and rally government support (as in $$$) – to develop the standards that will make 3D Web the application platform of the future. We’re not so sure about the government aspect to this. If there is ‘goodness’ to these activities, people will pursue them to make money – even though the profit motive seems to be regarded as an increasingly distasteful and unsavory pursuit.