Internet May be Replaced with Faster System

By Pamela Mortimer

Imagine being able to download a movie within seconds or send your entire music collection at the same high speed. According to scientists, "The Grid" is 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.

Contrary to Al Gore’s statement, the Internet was actually invented by particle physicists at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN), a research facility located on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. With the Grid, CERN seems to have pulled another rabbit out of its hat.

Reports state that the Grid will have greater capabilities, as well. Due to accelerated power, the Grid will be able to transmit holographic images, offer online gaming to thousands of players simultaneously, and support high definition video phone service at the price of a local phone call.

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.

The real proof will appear this summer after CERN’s "red button day" – the start up of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to explore the universe’s origin. The grid will be set in motion at the same time to capture the data that the LHC generates.

The Grid project began seven years ago when scientists realized that the data from the LHC would generate more annual data than could be stored – approximately 56m CDs. In order to accommodate the influx of data, CERN had to develop another solution.

The current speed of the Internet was determined by the links that connected the servers and systems. Because the connectors and routers were designed for telephone calls, processes were limited to a degree.

The Grid, however, uses "dedicated fiber optic cables and modern routing centers", which means the entire system is devoted only to the exchange of data. Scientists report that 55,000 servers have already been installed - 200,000 servers are expected to be up and running within the next two years. Currently, 8,000 of the servers are residing in Britain.

Professor Tony Doyle, the Grid project’s technical director, "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."