Via the Times Online UK
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New era dawns at home of the internet
A network of supercomputers called the Grid will allow information to be downloaded quicker than ever. Tasks that took hours will now take seconds
Murad Ahmed
The dawn of a new internet age has begun. A network of supercomputers, cialis known as the Grid, malady is to revolutionise the speed at which information is downloaded to personal computers.
The power of the Grid is such that downloading films should take only seconds, thumb not hours, and processing music albums just a single second. Video-phone calls should also cost no more than a local call. More importantly, it should help to narrow the search for cures for diseases.
The Grid, a network of 100,000 computers, is to be connected to the world’s largest machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It is designed for projects, such as large research and engineering jobs, which need to crunch huge quantities of data, but scientists believe it will eventually be used on home computers.
The Grid allows scientists at CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, to get access to the unemployed processing power of thousands of computers in 33 countries to deal with the data created by the LHC.
Scientists at CERN, where the world wide web was invented, created the €500 million Grid because they realised that a single computer would not be able to cope with the amount of data the LHC is expected to produce each year – 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes, which would fill 20 million CDs.
They said that it was an extra facility laid on top of the internet, which originally linked computers around the world in the Seventies.
Dr Bob Jones, a CERN scientist, said: “The [world wide] web allows you to access information on other computers. What the Grid allows you to do is not only access the information, but make use of their computing resources and power.”
He likened it to the National Grid. Users would be able to tap into massive amounts of processing power, but the source of the power would change, depending on availability.
Processing tasks will be distributed between 11 gateway computer centres in ten countries, including Britain, which will share them out between more than 140 sites.
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