Interweb made obsolete
Outdone by superfast grid
THE WORLD-WIDE wibble is officially obsolete, according to quality organ the Jellygraph. Apparently a new “grid” system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections will replace the Internet.
Swiss boffins have stopped concentrating on the great cheese versus black hole philosophical questions and have started working out a way of replacing the internet with something a bit faster.
The grid system is a spin-off from Cern and could provide shedloads of power down the web. The paper quotes David Britton, a physics boffin at Glasgow University who claims that with this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like him cannot even imagine.
Apparently the grid will be switched on this summer and has already calculated the price of rice pudding in Zimbabwe to five decimal places. However it will be dealing with the massive amount of information that a new particle accelerator will be generating.
The grid has been built with fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, there are 55,000 grid servers already installed, a figure which is expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years. Professor Tony technical director of the grid project, told the Torygraph that he needed so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern.
He said that the only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.
In Blighty there are more than 8,000 servers on the grid system, meaning access could be available to universities as early as this autumn. µ
L'Inq
www.telegraph.co.uk
Comments
Def of terms?
Well, Nick, I like a lot of your reportage but in this case would you mind defining the term 'grid'?You got 4 of the 5 W's, give or take, but the 'what is it' is not answered.
grid website
http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/index.htmlDefine replace?
Well without getting into why the 'grid' will not work outside of businesses... Let's just say that you spun this thing in completely new and incorrect directions Nick. This is an application of the Internet, not a replacement for. ALSO, cloud computing, which this is, is nothing new.It's all good though. They send out a press release, you guys use it as filler, and they get people reading their website.
Get real
Right, it'll connect the universities up, but average citizens? Get real. Most fiber optics is dark anyway, meaning that it's not the hardware that's the issue, more the compelling need (or lack thereof) to provide normal citizens with large amounts of bandwidth.I'm pretty sure...
...that this article is a load of rubbish. Why on earth would an IT site go quoting a technologically-illiterate tabloid newspaper for its source on something as technological as grid computing?--[a new “grid” system which is 10,000 times faster than broadband connections will replace the Internet.]--
What are you smoking? The connections from CERN to the Tier1 GRID centres will indeed be fast, gigabits fast, but don't expect mere mortals to get that sort of backbone speed on their residential DSL any time soon. Even if they did it wouldn't have anything to do with the GRID, which is a batch distributed computing system not a low-level network protocol.