Getting On The Grid
It all began with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator that will give scientists information on the origin of the universe, among other things. That is scheduled to begin operation later this summer, but years ago the developers realized that the new accelerator, once complete, will generate data at prodigious speed and in amazing quantities. Experiments on the LHC are expected to produce 15 million gigabytes of data per year. The scientists realized early on that if they wanted to share that data with institutions around the globe they were not going to be able to use the Internet without causing such a bottle-neck that the whole thing would come to a grinding halt. And they have to spread the data around for analysis, because all the computers at CERN do not have enough power to analyze that much data.
So they built a new high-speed replacement for the Internet, and called it The Grid. Sounds like something out of science fiction, doesn’t it? But this is real and it exists today. Developed at CERN, the same organization responsible for developing the Internet, it consists entirely of state of the art components, high speed and high capacity routers and fiber optic cable. With this new network it is possible to send data 10,000 times faster than any current broadband internet speeds.
You won’t be seeing any improvement in Internet speed when The Grid is activated this summer though — it is a private network between major research institutions around the world, and will not be handling Internet traffic. But it may serve as a model for commercial development of the next generation Internet, where holograms will be transferred as quickly and easily as small JPEGs today.