[Dialogue] Coming soon: superfast internet - Times Online

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 From The Sunday Times
April 6, 2008
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.


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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and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components  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.”

HAVE YOUR SAY
How do you get this? If you can that is. If not then when can you get  
it?
Bob Marlie, Valbonne, France
How about "Global Gaming Grid (ggg)" for a full name?

Maybe they could set up a system where people could register domain  
names --like on the web-- for example.... ggg.yahoo.com .

Cloud computing is very likely what Mssrs. Cerf and Kahn wanted the  
Internet to be all along, but is only now becoming technologically  
feasible.
Ed, Jacksonville, FL
Progress comes at the speed the market will allow. Innovation comes  
from necessity. The only way this innovation will be broadly  
implemented is through the market, through Capitalism.
dougfromeagan, Eagan, MN
Read all 203 comments
HAVE YOUR SAY
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This may enrich our spirit lives beyond what we know now, and enable  
computing in the third well.

George Holcombe
14900 Yellowleaf Tr.
Austin, TX 78728
Home: 512/252-2756
Mobile 512/294-5952
geowanda at earthlink.net


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