The Grid to Render the Web Obsolete

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grid, by contrast has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, ensuring there are no outdated components that manage to slow down the speed of data transmission.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.