Superfast Internet Coming Soon Via the Grid

Today's Internet will eventually be obsolete thanks to the grid computing project from CERN, the same research center that bought us the current Internet. The Grid is 10,000 times faster than a typical high-speed broadband connection.

The Grid was developed out of the project of Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. CERN’s LHC requires massive computing power.

LHC will generate an annual data equivalent of 56 million CDs (enough to make a stack 40 miles high). So, they needed a new advanced system to save and analyze the data. Thus, the grid was born.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, told Times Online, UK:

“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 centers in other countries.”

The LHC will be turned on this summer and the grid operating system will be started at the same time as it captures the data.

The old Internet is linked together by a series of cables and routing equipment originally designed for telephone calls (hence lack the capacity for high speed data transmission required for high definition movies, online gaming, holographic images, data from astronomy and others).

The new grid, on the other hand, will have dedicated fiber optic cables and modern routing centers and will be able to transmit data in mere seconds compared to hours or days. The full feature film or the entire Rolling Stones catalogs can be transmitted from Britain to Japan in less than 2 seconds with the grid.

Currently there are 55,000 servers installed in the grid, but that will grow to 200,000 servers worldwide within the next two years. David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies will revolutionize the society. He told Times Online:

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,”

The grid network connect CERN to 11 centers in the United States, Britain, Canada, the Far East, Europe and other parts of the world. And from each center, others are connected using high-speed academic networks to make the grid even deeper.

In Britain alone, there are 8,000 servers. So by the end of this year students in universities can access the net at high speeds from the grid, bypassing the current internet.

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.

Web users will keep data online in a cloud-computing environment and access it from anywhere.

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 main reason the grid was started is to help the LHC in hunting down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson, which is predicted in theory but not yet found. The Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass. To study this, there will be a huge amounts of data being transferred -- something today's Internet cannot handle. However even with the new grid, it will take years for them to analyze all the data.

The grid is finding plenty of interest in other areas as well: It is helping telecom providers transfer movie downloads in seconds by means of dynamic switching; and it is helping medical research scientists design new drugs against malaria. With the grid, they were able to analyze 140 million compounds with incredible speed. If researchers had done the same study with the current Internet it would have taken them 420 years to analyze the same amount of data.