It is called The Grid and it will connect up every computer in the world, creating the most powerful and intelligent supercomputer ever seen. It will be able to send data to computers ten thousand times faster than the average broadband connection can and it will be capable of downloading a full film a continent away in 1-5 seconds. It is the end of the Internet as we know it. So what is The Grid and why does it sound so worryingly like The Matrix? More importantly is there a chance it will take over the world and enslave all of humanity?
The Matrix - humans harvested for batteries
I don’t usually write about dubious “technological breakthroughs” but I was genuinely interested in The Grid’s potential. I must confess I had not heard of it until a few weeks ago when it happened to be mentioned in passing on a radio program i was listening to. Evidently it has actually been around/in development for seven years. Anyway, I was so interested in it that I went around the net doing as much research as I could. It turns out it is being installed and harnessed in educational facilities in Europe and America this year and four or five years down the line it should begin entering homes world wide. It could bypass the need for a hard drive, turn all PCs into supercomputers and hopefully even allow for holographic imagery to be transmitted - at least that is what it’s creators envisage.
The internet has always been slow, really. It’s hardly surprising when you think about it. Phone lines were never meant to transport gigabytes of data. Cable and broadband, whilst delivering a much more useable service than the phone modems, never had a chance to reach their full potential. That is because the internet as we know it is linked together by thousands of providers, routers, stations and then literally millions of interlinked data transporting cables. It is almost an impossibility for someone in America to download a file from England “directly” - and by that I mean via the same cable and routing system. This inability results in a lengthy wait and a high percentage data loss. Simply put, the evolution of the internet - whilst practical - has been highly inefficient.
The Grid
To give you an idea of how fast The Grid is, I have drawn up two charts. Ignore what the numbers represent, they are there only to give you an idea of how much faster or slower a certain connection is.
Speed of a 56k Modem vs an average broadband connection
Speed of an average broadband connection vs The Grid
The Grid has been developed by the organisation responsible for the World Wide Web - The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). They developed The Grid as a method to link together the worlds computers and turn them into the most powerful supercomputer imaginable.
Their web site states: “The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), currently being built at CERN near Geneva, is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations in 2007, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze.
The mission of the LHC Computing Project (LCG) is to build and maintain a data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.”
OK, quite complex, but basically the experiments that the people at CERN undertake often require much more computing power than is available to them or any other organisation, and so in 2001 they began work on linking together powerful computers all over the world to run their tasks for them.
“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.” Stated technical director Professor Tony Doyle.
The computers are all linked together via huge dedicated fibre optic cables and advanced routing centres. Huge cables link continents with smaller, but still dedicated, cables webbing out from those. This allows for almost instantaneous data transportation with almost none of said data lost along the way.
The Grid spidering out in a web around the world
![The grid - A true \](http://www.breakfrom.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/thegrid4.jpg "The grid - A true \")
In the seven short years the project has been running, an incredible 60,000 servers have been installed world-wide. CERN predict that by 2010 there will be 200,000 servers spread over each continent. Soon after it will be available in homes world wide. The 200,000 servers will link off via more dedicated cables to peoples homes. The more computers on The Grid, the more processing power available to it. Downloads will be instantaneous and the scientists at CERN believe personal hard drives will be made obsolete and everyone on The Grid will share one mass data storage facility. What’s the point of storing data when we can download gigabytes of videos or music instantaneously, anyway?
Tony Doyle goes on to say “Projects like The Grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science…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.”
Holographic communication - Coming soon?
The Grid will be available to students this year, and an internet café near you by 2012.
Breakfrom
April 15th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
Interesting concept, it is clear to see that this is a plan to redesign the backbone that links nations and continents to each other increasing bandwidth available from country to country
What this won’t, however, affect, is the speed available to end users. This is up to the individual internet service providers.
No amount of work done to create this “Grid” will affect the cabling coming into residential and business properties.
ADSL connections will still be limited by the qualtiy, length, and age of copper phone lines
Cable will still be limited by the bandwidth available at each UBR or Hub, which is under the sole control of the Cable ISPs (Virgin Media here in the UK).
I sorely doubt that this “Grid” plan will involve relaying every single piece of cable in every single street in the world to deliver these supposed speeds, now will it?
Looks like another large scale concept designed to ease international IP congestion, mis-interpered as something that will actually affect end users.
I am afraid that it will not. This is technologically and economically impossible, withuot a $500 tax on every single individual in the world to fund the rehash of the globe’s telecommunications infrastructure.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Hey Nick Derczynski,
I see your point, pretty interesting really.
It would be interesting if wireless connections will take the place of the globe’s telephone cabling anyway. As this would make the grid more than possible.. or would it?
April 18th, 2008 at 10:06 am
Wireless communications will replace land lines very soon. Already, I find it costs less each month to exclusively use a mobile phone than it does to use the land line. The only reason I still have a land line is because wireless broadband in Australia has pathetic download limits of between 1 and 3 GB a month, at a speed of 512kb/s. I can’t live like that :P. But very soon, we’ll be faced with a choice between “communist” and “capitalist” communications. We’ll have millions of kilometers of obsolete cabling (phone lines) to replace, and then when every computer is connected to this “Grid”, the individual storage space and connections will essentially replace servers (in an ideal world). We can stick with being shafted by a company only interested in the bottom line, and only doing enough for the customer to be just that little bit better than the competition, or we could choose a system owned and managed by the people that actually use it. Communities that need a higher bandwidth cable going to them could raise the money to lay one themselves. No ISP to pay after that. (Warning: car analogy) Rent a car for all eternity, or buy it once? Which would you prefer?
April 21st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Wireless broadband will have replaced nearly all “wired” home networks within the next five years i would think. It seems likely each major city will be linked to “the grid” soon after and pumping it out wirelessly to all homes nearby. So id have to disagree with the cabling problem.
Im curious to know if the grid will actually benefit the average user though, seeing as it has been developed for massive calculations in CERN, it may be that we are not allowed to use it fully and it may just be a slight upgrade of our current broadband.
April 21st, 2008 at 5:37 pm
And id be up for buying the car once btw
August 18th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Sandra Kellog wrote about it lately but i think what you wrote is much better.
August 18th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
funny, Tony Santos wrote about this topic exactly the other day.