Peoples Republic of South Devon

The Grid

August 8th, 2008

So, will the Internet ever become obsolete? How far are we from developing something bigger, faster, and better, that is available to one and all? With rumours and panic flying about that the Internet could be full and unusable by as soon as 2010, isn’t it time someone started thinking of a solution?

Well worry not, unsurprisingly somebody’s got it all under control.

Actually, quite a few ’sombody’s’. In fact, potentially everybody with a computer. Welcome to the world of Grid Computing…..

Grid Computing as a smaller scale concept is nothing new now. Many research and government groups have utilised it’s benefits for a number of years. Basically, a grid consists of a number of individual, networked computers combining their resources to undertake a greater task. In the past, research projects that have generated massive amounts of data have used grid computing to process it, making the process quicker, cheaper, and less resource-heavy.

But the Grid that could eventually benefit us all has strangely come from the same place as the Internet did. On more than one occasion in our previous articles we have directed your attention towards the CERN laboratories on the franco-Swiss border. CERN’s main function is to provide the particle accelerators required for high-energy physics research, and it was to communicate internally the results of this research that Tim Berners-Lee first developed the Internet here in 1990.

But with the commencement of the Large Hadron Collider project, CERN needs a way of processing more data than ever before. The LHC will produce 15 petabytes of information every year which is, as they claim, over 1000x the amount of information in book form printed every year around the world. If you put all that data on cd and stacked them up, the pile would be 20km high – that’s higher than cruising altitude for most aeroplanes….

To store and process this data, CERN have been pushing forward grid technology over the last 6 years and have developed a system by which the content from the LHC is stored and processed on 1000’s of computers situated on hundreds of sites in over 30 countries. But what makes this so ground breaking is that all the data will be available seamlessly at all of the sites at any time, allowing academics to further the research without having to physically store all the info themselves.

Some of the future benefits of grid systems such as this are clear to see. Imagine being able to cut out the middle men (web servers and Internet Service Providers), and still access the same (or more) information as is currently possible. Add to this lightening fast speeds – up to 10,000 times as fast as current broadband – and as a successor for the Internet, Grid interfaces seem an obvious choice.

For more information about the potential of The Grid, and plans for it’s implementation, check out CERN’s dedicated grid page, and this informative article by The Time.

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Entry Filed under: technology