Address needs of 3D Web, Intel tells developers

PORTLAND, USA: Developers of supercomputers have been exhorted to “act” to address the needs of the 3D Web.

At the SC09 conference held in Portland, Justin Rattner, chief technology officer of Intel Corporation and the keynote speaker, said high-performance computing (HPC) is at present growing only at the rate of 3.8 per cent a year. The rate of growth has to be enhanced by addressing the needs of the 3D Web, he added.

Stressing that nothing is more important to the long-term health of the HPC industry than the 3D Web, Rattner said government support is not sufficient to ensure in building the best HPC systems possible.

All of the industry’s HPC skills, he went on, must be applied to the standardization, development, and use of the 3D Web. By the 3D Web, Justin Rattner mainly meant big, multi-player, role-playing games like ‘World of Warcraft’.

However, even while the market for ‘virtual worlds’ is growing, there is a need to stimulate the area of supercomputing, which requires established revenue bases such as the fashion industry.

According to Rattner, fashion is one of the major industries yet to be computerized. Now, the fashion industry is almost totally operating in “manual mode.”

In order to computerize the fashion industry, Intel Corporation is working with the Fashion Research Institute Incorporate (FRI), based in New York, the United States, with a view to replacing physical prototyping of designs with online 3D modelling software.

Rattner said that, according to the FRI, switching the design process over to a 3D web application will reduce prototyping costs by 65 per cent and cut the design time by 75 per cent.