THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day – the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle – but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds – a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
April 25th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
This is one of the most interesting thing I have ever seen on the internet ever. The Gird, interesting…. If this becomes real, everything will change, our lives, the way we do business etc.
April 25th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Can you tell me where you got this information from? I would like to read more in detail about this Grid project.
April 26th, 2008 at 11:48 am
This sure is.But being in India i am only hoping for a UL-2mbps or a 8mbps-500 plan!!
Anyway,read more about the Grid project here:
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/GridatCERN/gridatcern.html
A little bit more here:
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/Spotlight/SpotlightGrid-en.html
May 28th, 2008 at 3:04 am
LOL Sure CERN created the original Internet, but who made it mainstream? Thank you, hackers. ^_^
This sounds wonderful though! Combine this with IPv6, and we’re set for the next decade at least!
May 29th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
GRID has been around for years now, my university is one of the key locations and participants of it, dont think of it going mainsteam anytime soon, government funding to perfect it has been decreasing for years. it wont necessarily be used for say surfing the web or downloading. the main idea behind it is to treat computing in the sameway we treat electricity (grid), in the sense of you will pay for computing resources on demand, like for instance you plug your kettle in, on demand you get power, you dont really care where it comes from you just get it and at the end of the month you get billed for the electricity you use. just apply that idea to computing
June 4th, 2008 at 1:13 am
ISPs are pretty slow to ever upgrade the infrastructure as it stands, we’re still stuck pumping our data through tubes that weren’t designed to carry more than a telephone call. On the other hand, “the future” is a long amount of time, so it would be short-sighted to say we won’t see this connecting every home, “in the future”.
If/when it does, the online world could become a rather interesting place. Plenty of bandwidth to burn, instead of text IM, we could see a feed so detailed that you forget you’re not sat in the same room with the other person. Online gaming could benefit from the same, online file storage could be quick enough that there’s no noticeable drop in speed compared to local storage, Cyberworld here we come.
I always find it slightly amusing when stories about immense bandwidth relate it to the speed with which you can download films, when there’s precious few if any legal means of downloading the latest films… maybe eventually the media industries will catch on to the fact that they can’t keep charging silly amounts of money for plastic discs. Let’s hope so.
June 7th, 2008 at 12:05 am
The GRID won’t be mainstream for the exact reasons Daniel was talking about. Net Neutrality should keep ISPs from telling me what I can share and what part of the internet I am allowed to browse to.
The foundation has been laid by major telephone companies across the US. But it has not been activated and most likely will not be activated until the ISP’s get what the want, and that is to be the gatekeepers to the internet.
June 14th, 2008 at 11:12 am
Although better internet speed is obviously always better (as is more hard disk space, faster CPU’s, etc), I think this Grid thing is cool but it will not be such a change in regular people’s lives. The paradigm change of Internet vs No Internet really changed our lives. Having faster TV downloads, lower or zero cost phone calls, or nicer gaming virtual worlds will not lower the price of oil or improve the housing market or improve unemployment…
June 14th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Yay!! A faster way to get porn…..
June 15th, 2008 at 4:14 am
Do not be fooled by these “salesmen” trying to sell you on the next best thing. This is the telecommunications way of controlling the content of the internet by guising it as a faster, more efficient way of transmitting data. The “grid” will be faster simply because it will all contain the same content. No longer will you have your freedom of expression as you now do on the internet. The “grid”, another product of DARPA, will filter content through the mainstream media filters that are already in place. Do you really want all of your personal data online? Do you want to pay for every song you listen to every time you listen to it like you would a juke box? Mainstream media does. Why? Easy, money and control. Do not worship this golden calf people for it is damnation. This “grid” would destroy our freedom of speach and expression. People wake up and research issues that are important such as “net neutrality”, it is probably the most important issue of our time, unless you want to have an internet modeled after China’s internet.
June 15th, 2008 at 10:25 am
J you really need to stop your close minded and ignorant thinking. First of all, who cares how they make it faster? Personally I’d prefer having all of my data stored in a secure cache, accessible from nearly anywhere. Is it a security risk? Perhaps, but nothing is protected from a dedicated hacker now a days. If you don’t believe me, go and talk to Todd Davis and get some insight. Secondly, no one can stop our freedom of expression or speech. The same hackers that are trying to break into your things are finding ways around THEIR restrictions. More over, this article says nothing and has nothing to deal with payment plans, if any, for the future. Finally, do not stop our progression. It’s enough people like you that think it’s just another way for a government to control you when in actuality it’s a major step into an unknown region. Quit your squabbling and support it so we can get out of this era and into a new one.
June 15th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Truly amazing. One small thing: Instead of calling the “grid,” perhaps they should call it the “matrix?”
June 16th, 2008 at 2:57 am
If this actually means what it says, this could be the equivalent of explosion for technology as we know it. (Like coming to the end of a tunnel, out into space.) Weird analogy, I know, but this adds a whole new dimension to the internet we know now. I agree with Ender that progress should not be hindered, but as J says we should be wary. This is tantalizing none the less.
P.S. Nice touch Bottlerocket. I hope the name sticks.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Very interesting article. Hopefully we can see it in action. Is this different then the INTERNET 2 project?
December 17th, 2008 at 9:19 am
if you think this is interesting…http://randominium.wordpress.com
December 31st, 2008 at 8:56 am
oh noes! teh interweb’s base are belong to them!
January 1st, 2009 at 10:59 am
The application of this would certainly be worth the risk to power consumption and the rampant rise of piracy. However, piracy modernly is technically just the sharing of data from one point to another, multiplied by infinity.
I want.
January 1st, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I think i would want to stick with the internet. I dont like it when a new technology is implemented, it always seems to be ridden with bugs and problems. call me paranoid, but im betting this is a goverment technology being used to track everything we do. I dont see why we have to make a new “internet” or ” The Grid ” when what we have got is perfectly fine. long the days of 56k!
January 1st, 2009 at 8:57 pm
I’m not sure that I understand how the Grid is any different from the internet? What it sounds like to me is simply another network on the internet.
The internet is exactly that. A collection of interconnected networks.
I’m a computer science student specializing in networking and low level programming. Essentially the Grid is just another network ON the internet. Yea, it has blazing fast speeds, and apparently amazing number crunching abilities… but there is nothing about it that keeps it from being simply another portion of the wider internet.
Realistically all that needs to happen to connect the two is simply plug an Ethernet cable into one of the nodes on the Grid. Yea, that’s a huge oversimplification, but it isn’t all that much more complicated than that. Assuming that the computers that this Grid runs on have anything resembling a TCP/IP stack (which comes on every operating system you could care to mention), and that the nodes on the Grid network have some kind of routing capability… your just looking at a giant LAN. Exactly like the one in your house with a linksys router… only spread out over half the Earth, and connected using incredibly expensive and fancy Ethernet cable (Fiber optic).
And I’m rather skeptical of the dynamic routing technology. It sounds exactly like circuit switching… the previously dominant routing technology. Circuit switching is what was used before the www she-bang. The problems with it were simply that once the resources were allocated you cant get them back until the user gives them back. So if you have a 40 minute phone conversation that has 30 minutes of dead air, you can’t recoup any of the lost 30 minutes. Packet switching was developed on the principal that the ISP’s only wanted to have to deliver what the user actually wanted delivered. With increased complexity and sophistication, I’m sure dynamic routing might be feasible. Perhaps not better than what we have, but workable.
In terms of known data, such as a DVD, I can see some serious benefits of it… But the cost to the carriers will increase in comparison to packet switching. Which I suppose would be where other commenters mentioned pay per usage billing fitting into the system.
And in any case, speeds can only increase to the speed of the lowest capacity link between the user and the data. If your trying to access a webpage from a server that is using a 56K modem, even if your using a cable modem, or satellite connection, I guarantee you that you will never get speeds higher than 56k from that server. The only way possible is if something cached the data somewhere in between.
To Ender:
I don’t know where your from, and I can only really speak from my own personal experiences.
Cloud Computing is a BAD thing.
This is the situation that I am in right now. I came home from my studies for a few weeks to visit my folks. I helped my dad take out the trash for pickup the next day. But stupid me I must have tossed my wallet in with the big wad of receipts that I was throughout out. I’m currently in Chicago, in the USA with my parents. I can get around easy enough. And even though I threw away my drivers license, its not a big deal to have unless I get stopped by a police officer. I’m a good driver, so thats unlikely. But, I went to the department of motor vehicles the other day to get it replaced, and they can’t help me. All of the papers that let the American government know that I’m a real person are sitting on my desk 200 miles away at my school.
Yea, they have policies in place to help out with this, it just takes time, but its not that big of a deal.
But imagine this.
Say you like to listen to the band Aerosmith. I like some of their stuff. Your computer uses the cloud for storing your music collection. What if Aerosmith, or whoever happens to own the copyright to their music, decides that they don’t want to let anyone listen to their Aerosmith music unless they give them more money? Given general complexity issues with data-storage, I shit you not it is way more cost effective to store only a single copy (or at least a few local caches of a single copy) of a single song, than it is to store every single version of compression, decompression, recompression, transcoding, and what have you of that same song.
So… stopping people from listening to the song that the copyright holders want to charge more money for.. well, that’s trivial. It’s as simple as flipping a bit on the machine. Access–. so on.
Whenever you allow someone else to control any aspect of your life, you are allowing them more power over you than you realize.
I can get my drivers license back, but only because the people I’ve spoken with are good people, and they understand my situation. They won’t get anything more or less in compensation for helping me out than they would if they told me to fuck off. I effectively don’t exist as far as my government is concerned. I have absolutely no way to prove I am who I say I am. Yea, my picture is all over their databases… but that isn’t proof. Thats just coincidence.
The people who happen to want more money for those songs? Well, they have a very very good reason to tell you to fuck off if you don’t pay their bribe. They want their bribe…
Or hell… what if the database just forgets who you are? Accidents happen sometimes.
March 27th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I read about the grid project, in some news paper article. They had mentioned few numbers on how much the speed of the net would be. After looking at it I just thought, there wouldn’t be any need to download high quality movies at all! you can just watch them streaming!
August 17th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Fascinating post! One day VoIP and other internet technologies that seem advanced now will bound to appear slow. Thanks again.
March 17th, 2010 at 7:29 am
who da leet haxor lol
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