The Grid System

Imagine being able to download a movie within seconds or send your entire music collection at the same high speed ??

The new lightning fast “Grid" system will be unlocked this summer, which will be able to process information at 10,000 times faster than a current broadband connection and is poised to make the current Internet seem slower than snail mail. The Grid is expected to make the Internet obsolete and will have the capability to download movies, music catalogues, and databases in seconds. "The Grid”, at speeds of 10,000 times faster than broadband, created by scientists at Cern, the center for experimental physics will become a web of its own.

Scientists realized that the data from the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) would generate more annual data than it could be stored – approximately 56m CDs. Thus, the Grid project began, seven years ago at CERN, near Geneva. In order to accommodate the influx of data, CERN had to develop another solution. The lightning-fast Grid will become visible after Scientists at Cern decide for their "red button” day, when they will switch-on the LHC, a new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe and the grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.

As the Internet was evolved by linking together of a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, it lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission. Links that connected the servers and systems determined the current speed of the Internet but as the connectors and routers were designed for telephone calls, processes were limited to a degree. By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres and as a result, there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. "The Grid" will be able to provide enough 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 due to accelerated power.

David Britton, a Physics professor at Glasgow University and one of the principal figures in the Grid project, believes that the new technology could "revolutionize" 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. There are 55,000 grid servers already installed, a figure that is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, the Grid project’s technical director 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 centers in other countries."

Ian Bird, project leader for CERN’s high-speed computing project opinionates that 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. Users would use the new "Cloud computing" as a common way to organize personal and private information that would be stored on the Grid and accessible from anywhere.

The Grid will allow thousands of Research Centers, Universities, etc. share their data storage resources and computing power transforming the Internet into a giant global "Super Computer" and building capacity for the science of tomorrow.

However, the grid 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.

Moreover, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers, molecular biologists and even to design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills a large number of 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. Irrespective of names, all sectors are going to reap huge benefits on the discovery of the latest Grid system.