In case you weren’t able to attend Justin Rattner’s keynote on the 3D Internet, you might want to read my interview with him before the show, and then Timothy Prickett Morgan’s coverage at El Reg. It was a stimulating talk
The projections that Rattner cited showed HPC sales growing at a compound annual growth rate of 3.6 per cent in those years, rising from a little bit below $8bn a year in 2008 to around $9bn in 2013.
“This is not a healthy business,” Rattner declared. “If this is what we have to look forward to, we are all in for a tough time.”
The solution? A killer application for a ubiquitous technology that needs a lot of compute
To do this, it means the kind of exotic computing that the world’s supercomputer centers don’t even take for granted has to go mainstream. And rather than looking for a killer app in particular, Intel wants to help foster a killer application framework. “HPC needs a killer application – it needs to be simple, it needs to be elegant.”
Rattner showed the standard block diagram of the functional capabilities of the 3D Web architecture Intel is trying to foster, but basically the idea is to merge technologies in the HPC field, which allow for the load balancing of applications across a cluster of machines and which provide the underlying physics of simulations to be married to the identity management, content distribution, and commerce and payment systems of emerging cloud infrastructure.
More in the Register piece.