Coming soon: superfast internet.

[rideit]

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...cle3689881.ece

Coming soon: superfast internet

Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
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By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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.”

[irul&ublo]

Sweet...now we'll be able to get the latest on Frozen and Buzz even faster? Will this new and powerful grid provide x-ray vision to see through Shania's clothes? Will brownmonkey's ass look even more lucious? Will everyone waste time a a faster clip?

[Tippster]

Great. Too bad the Black Hole they create when they switch on the LHC will kill us all.

[Rubicon]

They should start calling this thing Skynet.

[MrZach]

Sweet...now we'll be able to get the latest on Frozen and Buzz even faster?

Do not want

Will this new and powerful grid provide x-ray vision to see through Shania's clothes?

Want

Will brownmonkey's ass look even more lucious?

Do not want

Will everyone waste time a a faster clip?

[Homer]Hmmmm......[\Homer]

[f2f]

what a crock of bullshit. 'grid computing' is a paradigm, not a series of tubes (except where there are tubes involved, but those are definitely not "coming soon" near you)

whoever wrote this article should be shot, but not before we get our next round of funding for waving hands at gullible folk and inventing new words.

oh, and by the way, the future is in Cloud computing. the grid is dead

[Tippster]

f2f's reading skilzz = ungood.

[f2f]

f2f's reading skilzz = ungood.

i find your lack of faith disturbing

i get paid to have the word "grid" in my job title. i am just like one of those sad nerds who had to explain to the author of the article what "grid" means, only to have the other side fail completely in understanding it.

[Tippster]

Yet they wrote that the new faster fiber network they built (they did) and that the Author is calling "The Grid" is likely the basis of "Cloud Computing." Whether or not that is or isn't "the Grid" is your point, I guess.

Either way it's kinda cool, as long as you're somehow hooked into this "cloud," which us non-science guys are not.

[iceman]

Either way it's kinda cool, as long as you're somehow hooked into this "cloud," which us non-science guys are not.

I am a non-science guy and have been accused of being in a cloud since approximately age five.

Therefor I refute you.

[Hugh Conway]

but not before we get our next round of funding for waving hands at gullible folk and inventing new words.

I agree. And this next thing better be what we make or we are screwed.

[RootSkier]

[timvwcom]

I'll admit I'm on my third glass of red wine, but that was friggin' hillarious root! Thanks.

[MrZach]

OK, you think that's awesomular?

You obviously do not know of the retroencabulator.

[f2f]

oh, you think the retroencabulator is awesome?

you obviously do not know of the Dual-tone multi-frequency dialling phones:


i strongly suggest the MST3K Version:

[summit]

w00t! Can't wait for that cuz my 1200 baud modem is too slow to stream 1080p pr0n

[bio-smear]

Before: OMG they're gonna make a black hole, we can't allow this, it's science gone wild.

Now: Faster internets? That sounds great.

[bio-smear]

Before: OMG they're gonna make a black hole, we can't allow this, it's science gone wild.

Now: Faster internets? That sounds great.

[Rubicon]

Before I moved to Jackson I was hooked up to a fiber optic internet connection for about 6 mo.

Baaaa-laaaaa-zzzzzing

Everything loaded instantly.

When downloading large files it became real obvious who had fast servers and who didn't.

[iscariot]

Great. Too bad the Black Hole they create when they switch on the LHC will kill us all.

Exactly.

But on the plus side...if we don't all die, we'll be able to download porn like never before.

[EPSkis]

Before: OMG they're gonna make a black hole, we can't allow this, it's science gone wild.

Now: Faster internets? That sounds great.

So if bio-smear can double post one minute apart in real-time on the existing slow internet, what would happen on the Grid?

As a technical aside ~ it'd take years for data STORAGE technology to catch up to something this fast. Instantaneous retrieval of data is useless unless you've got somewhere to PUT it, and at those speeds, it'd still take time for any existing drive to WRITE that much data. (Not to mention capacity limits) A 2TB drive could be filled pretty quickly, but does any home user OWN a 2TB drive? You're talking about a $5k-$25k investment for a suitable drive that's STILL only going to write at what, 300mb-400mbps?

So for the average user....We'll be able to access TGR & youtube.com that much faster....Sweet!

[rideit]

Will this allow us to masturbate faster?

[RootSkier]

Not necessarily faster, but definitely with more ferocity.

[snoboy]

You're talking about a $5k-$25k investment for a suitable drive that's STILL only going to write at what, 300mb-400mbps?

On my planet you can buy a 1 TB drive for ~$400. But yeah, speed is a whole other issue.

[bio-smear]

So if bio-smear can double post one minute apart in real-time on the existing slow internet, what would happen on the Grid?

Even if TGR exists in a cloud and everything happens at quantum superspeed, the AJAX submit form still has to be executed from our shitty home machines over Comcast cable.