R.I.P The Internet 1989 to 2008. Disconnected Mercilessly by The Grid

It is called The Grid and it will connect up every computer in the world, creating the most powerful and intelligent supercomputer ever seen. It will be able to send data to computers ten thousand times faster than the average broadband connection can and it will be capable of downloading a full film a continent away in 1-5 seconds. It is the end of the Internet as we know it. So what is The Grid and why does it sound so worryingly like The Matrix? More importantly is there a chance it will take over the world and enslave all of humanity?

I don’t usually write about dubious “technological breakthroughs” but I was genuinely interested in The Grid’s potential. I must confess I had not heard of it until a few weeks ago when it happened to be mentioned in passing on a radio program i was listening to. Evidently it has actually been around/in development for seven years. Anyway, I was so interested in it that I went around the net doing as much research as I could. It turns out it is being installed and harnessed in educational facilities in Europe and America this year and four or five years down the line it should begin entering homes world wide. It could bypass the need for a hard drive, turn all PCs into supercomputers and hopefully even allow for holographic imagery to be transmitted - at least that is what it’s creators envisage.

The internet has always been slow, really. It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. Phone lines were never meant to transport gigabytes of data. Cable and broadband, whilst delivering a much more useable service than the phone modems, never had a chance to reach their full potential. That is because the internet as we know it is linked together by thousands of providers, routers, stations and then literally millions of interlinked data transporting cables. It is almost an impossibility for someone in America to download a file from England “directly” - and by that I mean via the same cable and routing system. This inability results in a lengthy wait and a high percentage data loss. Simply put, the evolution of the internet - whilst practical - has been highly inefficient.

The Grid has been developed by the organisation responsible for the World Wide Web - The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). They developed The Grid as a method to link together the worlds computers and turn them into the most powerful supercomputer imaginable.

Their web site states: “The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2007, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze.

The mission of the LHC Computing Project (LCG) is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.”

OK, quite complex, but basically the experiments that the people at CERN undertake often require much more computing power than is available to them or any other organisation, and so in 2001 they began work on linking together powerful computers all over the world to run their tasks for them.

“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.” Stated technical director Professor Tony Doyle.

The computers are all linked together via huge dedicated fibre optic cables and advanced routing centres. Huge cables link continents with smaller, but still dedicated, cables webbing out from those. This allows for almost instantaneous data transportation with almost none of said data lost along the way.

In the seven short years the project has been running, an incredible 60,000 servers have been installed world-wide. CERN predict that by 2010 there will be 200,000 servers spread over each continent. Soon after it will be available in homes world wide. The 200,000 servers will link off via more dedicated cables to peoples homes. The more computers on The Grid, the more processing power available to it. Downloads will be instantaneous and the scientists at CERN believe personal hard drives will be made obsolete and everyone on The Grid will share one mass data storage facility. What’s the point of storing data when we can download gigabytes of videos or music instantaneously, anyway?

Tony Doyle goes on to say “Projects like The Grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science…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.”

~ Nicholas C. Smith
Project manager at Breakfrom Limited

Credits:
Fox News
DesignFirms.org
Wired Inc.
OpenGridForum