The Grid - a new internet but 10,000 times faster

[Hulyss]

Originally Posted by WoenK

This thing will surely be the biggest accomplishment of mankind for a long time, even if the black holes they create might destroy us (or rather according to quantuum mechanics and string theory, will surely destroy us and will not destroy us )

Ho yea. I though the same and in +, i realy close to the source irl ...
Thats weird lol.

Anyway, our actual www will be upgraded. It start to be in France at least, with optic fiber. Let say in around 15 years, we all have optic fiber at home.

[McCormick]

No, defenitly posted on the wrong part of the forum :p

It started in 2001 already :

http://www.wired.com/science/discove.../2001/03/42230

[Dion Red Strike]

The grid has been around a long time now... LHC is scheduled to go online very shortly (as in this year)....

I think the bigger story is the LHC.... but, it is not directly related to EU.... that being said, yes, the grid will, one day, become a commonplace item in homes, just like broadband connections today....

[Arkonen]

Nice to have a look at the near future, but what's next ... the Matrix ??

[Dextar]

Originally Posted by Vedder

As useful and powerful as grids probably will become, I don't think they'll be useful for real time online games like EU.

The power of grids comes from massive parallelity, which is hard to utilize in EU and other real time games, and which also have overhead of data transfer between grid nodes.

Heheh I heard the same such talk back in the late 80s.

Stuff like: "Normal people will not use the INTERNET, its only useful for researchers and scientists"

Or: "No one will use the INTERNET to buy things its too risky!"

Or My favorite: "Email will Never replace Regular Mail!"

It also reminds me of an oft quoted phrase I heard back in my Recording Studio Days: "The Noise wall will never be broken!"

This statement was quoted about analog recording and the number of times you could re-record a track or mix down several tracks to one track, each time you did you would get more and more noise and get signal loss.

Then along came digital technology and the noise wall wasn't just broken it was obliterated!

All of the above taught me the same lesson repeatedly!

"Never" really means "soon!"

And as the years pass, "soon" comes faster and faster!

Dex

[dalewj]

Originally Posted by Dextar

"Never" really means "soon!"

And as the years pass, "soon" comes faster and faster!

Dale will never get a ATH! NEVER

[NightwolfAA2k5]

Originally Posted by Dextar

"Never" really means "soon!"

And as the years pass, "soon" comes faster and faster!

I couldn't agree more

[aridash]

Originally Posted by Vedder

As useful and powerful as grids probably will become, I don't think they'll be useful for real time online games like EU.

The power of grids comes from massive parallelity, which is hard to utilize in EU and other real time games, and which also have overhead of data transfer between grid nodes.

this is quite right.

its not anything to do with "it wont happen", its a case of games dont lend themselves to parallelism. they are inheirently linear or sequential, even in a MMO context. one of the concepts with Cell is that you have a chip in your TV, one in your MP3 player, one in your washing machine even, and your PS3 utilises the processing capacity. problem is a) bandwidth for over the air data (bluetooth, 802.11) b) not knowing how much capacity is available (so you plan for worst case and dont take advantage) c) interprocessor sync/communiction overhead. In theory you might offload say AI to an external Cell, but then you have to be sure you will get the required dat back in time for a faster local Cell to utilise. realtime graphics is right out, since the bandwidth required just isnt possible with non-physical connections. but making a CGI film would be very well suitted as you are concerned with processing each frame seperately and compling an end product.

parallelism is great for large projects in science or mathematical modeling that are effectivly batch processed or can wait seconds/minutes/hours even days for a result to feed back into the core process, but not good for realtime applications. Its a whole new paradigm to what we currently use, it will create new types of applications (and games) rather than necessarily improving existing ones.

[Dextar]

Originally Posted by dalewj

Dale will never get a ATH! NEVER

"My odds of success dramatically improve with each attempt." -- John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind"




Dex

[Mkdesign]

Another of those articles with astonishing numbers, and no rough technical explanation whatsoever

Just picking random bits:

Researchers used the Grid to analyse 140 million compounds — something that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC more than 400 years.

I thought they had 2 millions of servers? that's a lot more than one standard internet-linked PC, or I must get something wrong...
Standard is once more not very practical definition...