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By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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.
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.”
Comments
* Have your say
I want to be isolated within a capsule, partially submerged in a gelatinous substance. I want to exist in a semi-vegetative state and be fed intravenously while my physical mind is wired into a holographic, grid-based collective, where it will be bombarded with archetypal images of what it's like to be human.
But I do not want to pay more than $39.99 per month for this, no installation fee, and I want first 3 months free if they don't include HBO.
MacGuffin, Panama City, Florida
Yeh, so I'm thinking, being taken to court to stop them playing with their new toy, and suddenly, they have this carrot to dangle in front of us to show that they really are the good guys. do I sound a little sceptical? Oh I do hope so.
They're using the LHC to do experiments, to find stuff out, as in, stuff they don't know, or at least don't know for certain, yet they can tell us, apparently with absolute certainty, that none of the fears that have been voiced, will happen. I'm starting to sense something here, a teeny wee touch of arrogance maybe?
Jimmy, Edinburgh, Scotland
it will probably be mainly used for porn, just like the one we've got now.... so much for greatness !!
monica, london,
Let's call it "The Matrix"!
steve, Klamath Falls,
Why don't we just let machines do all our thinking for us ? ( ie. The next Big Thing)
H.T. Benderski, McMasterville, Canada
Poster Comment:
The internet was developed by and for the military. There were reasons for the way it works now.
from March 18, 2003:
Caltech computer scientists develop FAST protocol to speed up Internet
Caltech computer scientists have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet fast enough to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds.
The protocol is called FAST, standing for Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The researchers have achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10 simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration. More importantly, the FAST protocol sustained this speed using standard packet size, stably over an extended period on shared networks in the presence of background traffic, making it adaptable for deployment on the world's high-speed production networks.