What impact will this have ?

[domaingenius]

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By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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.It is due to be launched in August this year as CernFast.

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.”

[Mahouni]

Sounds interesting. Not sure how many years it would take to be made accessible to the mass. Most of the people are still learning the current internet.

And there will always be need to navigation and the easiest and most convenient way seems to be text instead of numbers.

[denny007]

The porn downloads will be quick then...

[acesfull]

Let's just hope they port over all existing domain names to the new system!

[Tia Wood]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises
http://www22.verizon.com/content/ConsumerFios
http://www22.verizon.com/content/con...s+vs+cable.htm

Probably won't have much bad impact. Just like everything else: it will start out expensive and become less expensive as more people have it. Then computers will need mass upgrades again and Microsoft, Dell, etc get more money.

Then we'll be paying out the butt for really really fast internet and look upon cable as the dialup of tomorrow. Our kid's kids will make fun of us for using cable; the dinosaur internet connection. Then they'll come out with programs and technology that will cancel out dial-up from existence.

Soon we'll be able to beam to each other's houses via broadband.

It'll be fine.

[Rubber Duck]

Let's just hope they port over all existing domain names to the new system!

That is pretty much a given. Did we all change domain names when World upgraded from dial-up to broadband? Are we all going to use a different extension because the Internet is going mobile? Yes, I guess there will be a crowd that will think we are all going to be using dot Grid.

[Tia Wood]

I'm having trouble understanding: is this a new way to connect to the internet or a new way to serve (host) the internet or both?

lol, I like this "useful comparison":

http://www.crunchgear.com/2008/04/05...han-broadband/

Grid: 10,000
Internet: 0

[Rubber Duck]

It sounds as if it is little more than a new networking protocol.

It sounds to me as though it actually makes effective use of a lot of excess capacity that might not actually be there in the real internet.

[Dale Hubbard]

Sounds to me like simple distributed computing on a larger scale. The mosquito guys are already using it, like SETI.

[ArjunDhawan]

Nooooooooo
Can't watch this happen!

What will happen to all of us?
Domains will cease to exist.!

[Dale Hubbard]

Domains will stay. The way we access them will change.

[mediawizard]

The operative words here are 'future generations'.

Its the same deal with oil based vehicles and alternative power ones. Implementation is the key here, how many ISPs will be willing to trash their current infrastructure and put in these new cables, what will it cost to do this and how much of it will the consumer have to bear till the masses adopt this? Unless this is independently developed it will not fly for now.

I think its natural progression - dial up gave way to dsl, which gave way to cable, which gave way to wifi and this will go on. But there are still people using all the available connection methods, due to price, convenience and availability.

[ArjunDhawan]

Domains will stay. The way we access them will change.

Ahh, I re-read the news article and saw that .

But hey, whats the point of being able to download so much media in such little time?

I mean, I got a 1 MPBS download speed, and I can download a movie in less than 1 hour - I don't even get the time to watch what I already have? - Can't imagine what I'd do with a speed 10,000x that.

...at the end of the day, scientists do such research only to cross over the present thresholds and make new ones.

[Dale Hubbard]

Yes, scientists do that. If you started going online with a 300bps modem like I and a number of others here did; and now have up to a 32Mbps connection, you'll certailnly be wondering why we thought 300bps modems were wonderful *at the time*

[Stian]

Yes, scientists do that. If you started going online with a 300bps modem like I and a number of others here did; and now have up to a 32Mbps connection, you'll certailnly be wondering why we thought 300bps modems were wonderful *at the time*

Co-sign that one. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I was dialing BBS'es with my 14.4k US Robotics modem, downloading some of Apogee's shareware games (Commander Keen anyone?). Aaah, the early nineties ..

[Dale Hubbard]

Actually, thinking about it, we had remote access to the UK's teletext system back in the '80s on a BBC micro but I forget how that worked now. Memory has disappeared. Maybe it was a cradle mod/demod unit.

[DomainsInc]

I surely hope ISP's won't look at bandwidth use the same.

[Poohnix]

Yes, I read about that grid a couple of days ago.
Considering it's just 15 years since Cern invented www, I would guess this will be widespread in less than 10 years.
Of be replaced with something else, faster...

[HarveyJ]

This much data is useful for scientists... Have you ever seen how large some of the files they work with happen to be?
Being bale to do this by distributive computing would get it done faster, both by processing smaller chunks using spare cycles on other people's computers like BOINC already does, and by merit that these downloads would be near instant.

There is still the problem that anything mobile is going to have severely limited speeds, simply as the wireless spectrum is not there to support these kinds of speeds, unless we move into dangerous radiation territories. I mean, X-Ray based wireless would be great in terms of speeds (theoretically 2gbs), but everyone would get cancer.
This is only REALLY going to be available to academics and the uber wealthy for the next few decades.

However, I have this terrible mental image of those suckers that are born every minute just falling for scams faster and faster. Lightning fast payment for their chalky Viagra means they can buy them from 3 different sites in the same amount of time!
Or that the same SPAM:Traffic ratio will continue to exist... you know the 40% of ALL traffic on this will be SPAM...

Co-sign that one. Sometimes I wish I could go back to the days when I was dialing BBS'es with my 14.4k US Robotics modem, downloading some of Apogee's shareware games (Commander Keen anyone?). Aaah, the early nineties ..

You mean Commander Lame?! Rise of the Triad and Eye of the Beholder, my friend

[Stian]

This much data is useful for scientists... Have you ever seen how large some of the files they work with happen to be?
Being bale to do this by distributive computing would get it done faster, both by processing smaller chunks using spare cycles on other people's computers like BOINC already does, and by merit that these downloads would be near instant.

There is still the problem that anything mobile is going to have severely limited speeds, simply as the wireless spectrum is not there to support these kinds of speeds, unless we move into dangerous radiation territories. I mean, X-Ray based wireless would be great in terms of speeds (theoretically 2gbs), but everyone would get cancer.
This is only REALLY going to be available to academics and the uber wealthy for the next few decades.

However, I have this terrible mental image of those suckers that are born every minute just falling for scams faster and faster. Lightning fast payment for their chalky Viagra means they can buy them from 3 different sites in the same amount of time!
Or that the same SPAM:Traffic ratio will continue to exist... you know the 40% of ALL traffic on this will be SPAM...


You mean Commander Lame?! Rise of the Triad and Eye of the Beholder, my friend

Haha.. Rise of the Triad (ROTT) was awesome indeed. I used to play Eye of the Beholder on my Amiga 500.