The 3D Internet

Apologies Dave/Keith - I am definitely not as thurough blogging these things as Gregg.


One of the "thrust areas" for SC '09 was "the 3D internet", and this was the focus of the opening address Tuesday morning. The speaker was Justin Rattner (CTO Intel), but before Justin could take the stage we were addressed by the SC '09 chair, Wilf Pinfold, gave us a run down of the conference.

Despite some worries about the economic downturn impacting the conference, the numbers were still strong. Wilf informed us that all 350+ booths were sold, and there is 265,000+ square feet of exhibition space. 204 miles of fiber were run throughout the conference center, and with support of local internet providers, 400 Gbps of internet connectivity was provided to the conference center for the duration of SC 09. This year there was a 22% acceptance rate for technical papers, highlighting that this is a premiere conference in high performance computing. This SC also made an effort to be more sustainable - it is the first SC held in a LEED certified conference center, all plastic is plant-based and biodegradable, and plastic water bottles have been replaced by water coolers. Also, the conference center has recycling bins throughout, which appears to be the norm for Portland.

So on to Intel CTO Justin Rattner and the 3D Web. Justin noted how revenue in HPC has been growing very slowly (almost flat?), and that the field relies mostly on government funding for R&D and on "trickle-up" technology from the consumer space (e.g. Intel/AMD processors, GPUs,...). He thinks that the 3D Web can be the "killer app" for HPC and really help propel it to the next level. The 3D web will be continuously simulated, multi-view, and immersive and collaborative. A demo was given of ScienceSim, specifically Utah State's FernLand, which is a fern lifecycle and population genetics simulation. ScienceSim is based on OpenSim, and the idea is to standardize this technology so we have interoperability between virtual worlds After a virtual interaction with the FernLand researcher in ScienceSim, Justin welcomed Shenlei Winkler of the Fashion Institute of Technology on stage.

Shenlei discussed how the fashion industry is fairly unique in that it is a >$trillion industry yet has avoided heavy computerization. At FIT they are exploring using OpenSim to replace the traditional workflow where a designer comes up with a design, which is sent to a factory in another country where a prototype run is made and shipped back for evaluation, and this is repeated as the design is refined. With the 3D Web they can do this iterative process in a virtual world, cutting time, cost, and environmental impact. She stated how one of the important developments would be cloth simulation so designers can see the difference of how different fabrics drape and flow. Justin showed some impressive demonstrations of cloth physics simulations that were computationally intensive (~6 minutes per frame on a small cluster, much more HPC power will be needed for real-time cloth physics in virtual worlds).

Justin wrapped things up with a demonstration of a system with an Intel "larrabee" coprocessor. Matrix mathematics was offloaded to this coprocessor, achieving 1 teraflop on a single over-clocked chip. Supposedly this is the first 1 teraflop performance achieved with a single chip. Programming tools also need to improve to take advantage of this type of architecture, and Ct was discussed. Ct is a high-throughput C++ based language that takes some of the effort for programming this type of architecture off the shoulders of the programmer.