Can you imagine not needing your hard drive? How about Holographic meetings and conferences? That is only a few things the Grid will offer. The Grid evolved from the early desire to connect supercomputers into "metacomputers" that could be remotely controlled. The word "grid" was borrowed from the electricity grid, to imply that any compatible device could be plugged in anywhere on the Grid and be guaranteed a certain level of resources, regardless of where those resources might come from. The Grid is sort of a parallel Internet, built using fiber optic cables that run from CERN to 11 centers 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 center, more connections branch out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed networks. Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid, so that any student can theoretically be able to link with the grid instead of the internet from this fall.
The Internet evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, most of it was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore does not have the capacity for high-speed data transmission. On the other hand, the grid has been built with dedicated fiber optic cables and modern routing centers; this would mean there are no outdated components to slow the huge amounts of data. There are 55,000 servers already installed and it is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years. This high-speed computing, could make the internet so fast that people would stop using their everyday computers and laptops to store information and just trust it all to the Grid. Keeping all your information online to access from anywhere is called "Cloud Computing" And at speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, "the grid" will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The Grid is a high-speed computing network project started 7 years ago, as it's highly needed by the CERN (where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989). One of the main goals of the grid is to eliminate the dreaded "frozen screen" experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information, and 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 it's mass. The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle, but even working at peak performance it will generate only a few thousand Higgs boson particles a year. Analyzing this amount of data will be tremendous task that will keep even the Grid's huge capacity busy for many years.
More than 400 scientists met at the Global Grid Forum to discuss what may be the Internet's next evolutionary progression. The Grid won't merely enable document sharing and MP3 files exchange, but also connect PCs with sensors, telescopes and tidal-wave simulators. IBM's Brian Carpenter suggested "computing will become a utility just like any other utility." Carpenter said, "The Grid will open up... storage and transaction power in the same way that the Web opened up content. " And just as the Internet connects various public and private networks, Cisco Systems' Bob Aiken said, "you're going to have multiple grids, multiple sets of middleware that people are going to choose from to satisfy their applications." As conference moderator Walter Hoogland suggested, "The World Wide Web gave us a taste, but the Grid gives a vision of an ICT (Information and Communication Technology)-enabled world." The Grid that is being built is a new kind of Internet, except now the creators have better knowledge of where the bottlenecks and teething problems will be.
The grid is being made available to many academic researchers, including astronomers and molecular biologists. It's already been used to help design new medicine against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the Grid to analyze 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet PC 420 year." Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science," Doyle said. "Holographic video conferencing is closer than some may think. The ever-popular online gaming could grow to include thousands of people, and social networking could become the standard way we communicate.
Although the grid itself is probably won't be directly available for domestic internet use, many telecom providers and businesses have already introduced its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is dynamic switching, which creates a channel dedicated for internet users to download large volumes of data such as movies. 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.
Projects like the grid will bring huge changes to businesses and society as well as science. The history of the internet shows that you can't predict the real impact it could have, but we know it will be tremendous.
