The Internet is About to Change

~ The Internet Is About To Change ~

By UK Times
Apr 6, 2008 - 11:12:07 AM

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cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated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."