"The Grid, 2 secs movie download"

[iUnknown]

The birthplace of the Web, Cern, which is based near Geneva, is now busy working on "the grid" that boasts speeds nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical Broadband connection, and that may soon render the Web obsolete.

The grid computing project was started around seven years ago by researchers at Cern. They claim "the grid" is so fast it is capable of sending the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

With that kind of computing power, future generations will be able to collaborate and communicate in ways that older people cannot even imagine, said Professor of Physics at Glasgow University and leading light of the project.

Scientists at Cern intend to activate "the grid" this summer alongside what they term as 'red button day' when they will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the Universe.

So what is "the grid"? Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of "the grid" project, said they need so much processing power that there would even be an issue as to getting enough electricity to run the computers -- if they were all at Cern. Doyle said the only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centers in other countries.

Doyle explained that 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. From each center, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions that use existing high-speed academic networks. Which 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.

What does the grid have that Internet doesn't? While the Internet has been built by linking together a mesh of cables and routing equipment most of which lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission, the grid, by contrast has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, ensuring there are no outdated components that manage to slow down the speed of data transmission.

Commenting on the possibilities of the grid, Ian Bird, project leader, 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. Bird said it would lead to what is known as 'cloud computing', where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere.



I believe this is just a new network running off optic fibres and new fibre-optic exchanges overall improving the speed. With copper wires, more internet/telephone exchanges, therefore wires and things that will slow the speed down, are needed. They also loose much more data than optic fibres. The grid is a new name for world wide web, and instead of people buying computers with a lot of hard drive space, because they could drag and drop and copy a movie to a place on the web faster than to another place on the computer, they will be buying more webspace than high-spec computers.

People who don't like it say "put the lid on the grid" lol.

It's just a new way to make money >.>

What are your thoughts?

[N!ck]

Will probably just be a load of experimental OC-1536 connections.

[Stephen!]

Interesting.

[Decode]

Sorce?

[iUnknown]

Ah yes the article is from:

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/The_Grid_to_Render_the_Web_Obsolete/551-88299-643.html

Quote from somebody's comment (I've commented as "guy from london"):


The Grid is a aka for the Web, so no worries. However, at present fibre is already in place, effecting your high speed services from your local ISP. Ultimately though hard drives and local storage will never disappear, they will however become solid state and high capacity. There is even a hard drive in the works now that transfers data via optics rather than magnetics. SO all in all, the grid is just the next phase of tech.

[alexxxxx]

The 'Grid' won't challenge the 'Internet.' It will be used by institutions.

The Internet is already by far the largest network. Sure, it's slow, but it's speed will gradually increase as ISPs lay down fiber cables. DSL will be obsolete by 2015.

[iUnknown]

I think basically the grid is just internet optimized to work with fibre-optic cables... but broadband speeds reach 20mbit (provided by the huge company virgin media - optic fibres are travelling far to reach many places) and tests are being done to make this even faster. The grid is a bit pointless?

[iFuseDan]

This looks like an interesting one, combining grid-processing with network overlay. The internet is archaic in the sense that the simple design (bar some of the protocols that run over TCP) have not really changed in 30 years since its first conception. With the internet there is always a single point of failure, in the sense that if one of the mainstream routers fail you'll have a few backups then system failure. So its a linearly designed system, okay you are going to have bottlenecks with what they are proposing as they'll have connections into the mainstream areas, which are points of failure etc. If you were to DDoS their network, they have thousands of servers in a grid, so if one gets busy, it just offloads on another - which means that if a machine fails like the power-grids (SHOULD) work, there is redundancy in routing - meaning that it will simply go round the slow/dead spots. The combined processing / data access speed would in turn mean that data is almost always available near instantly unlike many of the current systems. If you look at your broadband connection for example, if you are downloading something your internet may run slow - in this setup, it'd route traffic through a different connection back to you, so that there is no slow point. Its an interesting idea, however the application makes better for actual content serving then a replacement for the actual internet.

[N!ck]

This looks like an interesting one, combining grid-processing with network overlay. The internet is archaic in the sense that the simple design (bar some of the protocols that run over TCP) have not really changed in 30 years since its first conception. With the internet there is always a single point of failure, in the sense that if one of the mainstream routers fail you'll have a few backups then system failure. So its a linearly designed system, okay you are going to have bottlenecks with what they are proposing as they'll have connections into the mainstream areas, which are points of failure etc. If you were to DDoS their network, they have thousands of servers in a grid, so if one gets busy, it just offloads on another - which means that if a machine fails like the power-grids (SHOULD) work, there is redundancy in routing - meaning that it will simply go round the slow/dead spots. The combined processing / data access speed would in turn mean that data is almost always available near instantly unlike many of the current systems. If you look at your broadband connection for example, if you are downloading something your internet may run slow - in this setup, it'd route traffic through a different connection back to you, so that there is no slow point. Its an interesting idea, however the application makes better for actual content serving then a replacement for the actual internet.

Well that is why TCP/IP is used as all bandwidth is treated equally, and so shared equally between all connected users. Obviously load balancing is applied over all nodes in the network.