The "killer app" for supercomputers is the 3D Web, according to Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner, who gave the keynote address at Supercomputer 2009 this week.

At SC 2009 (Nov. 14-20 in Portland, Ore.), nearly 9,000 computer scientists visited 318 booths exhibiting high-performance computing (HPC) solutions.

"The future of HPC is the 3D Web," said Rattner. "HPC will manage the computing workload, and cloud computing will manage the network workload—the next killer infrastructure to power the growth of HPC."

According to Rattner, the 3D Web is uniquely qualified to be the next killer app for supercomputers, since the 3D Web exploits all three reasons that supercomputers are faster than normal computers.

First, the 3D Web exploits the ability of supercomputers to provide sustained high performance. Traditional simulations, on the other hand, only run for a short time, then end. But 3D Web simulations, like Second Life, are continuously running, thereby completely utilizing the sustained performance of a supercomputer.

Second, the 3D Web matches the multicore architecture of supercomputers by simulating the particular viewpoint of every avatar. Instead of just simulating the objects in an environment, like a weather forecasting simulation, virtual worlds simulate each avatar's viewpoint, making it easier to distribute the computing tasks among multiple processors.

The third reason that supercomputers are fast is that they have high-performance interconnections among their multiple processors, which perfectly matches the collaborative and immersive nature of the 3D Web. As users interact in virtual worlds, the fast interconnection backplanes facilitate the shared data processing and communications tasks.

"Virtual worlds are examples of simple, easy-to-use 3D Web applications that have a literally insatiable appetite for computational power, but which ordinary people can use to share in a continuously simulated environment," said Rattner.

The main obstacle in the way of the 3D Web becoming the killer app for supercomputers in a lack of interoperability. Today there is no way to take your avatar from Second Life, for instance, and transfer it over to World of Warcraft. This critical problem is holding back growth of the 3D Web, according to Rattner.

"There is no interoperability—no standard way to move between the 3D virtual worlds," said Rattner. "But the HPC community can bring down these walled gardens by adopting OpenSim."

OpenSimulator—or OpenSim for short—offers an open-source platform for hosting virtual worlds that is compatible with the Second Life client, but can also be extended to host any number of alternative virtual worlds.

"The OpenSim architecture is a project to bridge the gap between the walled gardens separating the various 3D Websites today," said Rattner.

OpenSim offers an open, modular, extensible environment where avatars and other content can be transported among virtual worlds and other social networking sites, potentially solving one of the main problems with the 3D Web today.