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

[Ozi]

I hope this is the right part of the forum for this:

I found this article coming out of India. I have never heard of this before but does provide some positive thoughts about the future of online gaming. I hope some people find it interesting.

Whilst EU isn't mentioned, it does talk of online gaming and the increased capability to handle alot more concurrent users.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/I...ow/2935847.cms
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Spinning A New Web
9 Apr 2008, 0001 hrs IST

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When the largest machine in the world — the 27-kilometre-long particle accelerator in Geneva — gets operational later this year it's expected to generate raw data equivalent to 56 million CDs annually — enough to make a stack 64 kilometres high.

There's simply no way any single agency can process so much information by itself without facing a meltdown. The solution: Farm it out to different research organisations around the world.

To do that, however, would require the services of the internet which, unfortunately, can neither deliver the material fast enough nor has the throughput capacity to handle the load. It would collapse. So the European Organisation for Nuclear Research did one better: it developed its own version of the World Wide Web — called "the Grid". It's a staggering 10,000 times faster.

Using state-of-the-art fibre optic cables and, ultimately, some 2,00,000 servers, this parallel internetwork which connects CERN to the US, Canada, Far East and Europe is so blazingly fast that it can download a full-length feature film in a matter of seconds.

Normally the process can take hours. Although the Grid is not available for domestic users yet, the high-speed computing project could ultimately revolutionise business, society and science in ways old-timers can't even
imagine.

Experts are already saying the Grid could transmit holographic images, allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

More practically, it too can farm out massive amounts of research data. In one instance, it's helped design new drugs against malaria, which kills a million people worldwide each year.

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

But there are privacy and hacking issues here which should ideally be addressed first. For example, who will police this platform as espionage and information theft flourish with the potential to rob both individuals and corporations alike of their intellectual property in a matter of seconds?

The film and music industries must be quaking in their boots; movies and recordings could change hands in a flash.

Automated security systems have not proved effective so far and only human monitoring seems to work against the dedicated hacker.

Still, speeds in this range might prevent any form of security from being effective.

[the-unknown]

LHC uses "the grid" to send the data to regional computing centers around the world, and from there the data is disseminated thru the internet.

If I recall correctly, they will produce a few PBs of data every year. I doubt you will be using that sort of facilities anytime.

Anyway, it's hard enough for me to download enough files to fill my 100 mbps home connection, I doubt faster connections (except for better uploads) will actually show much difference.

[WoenK]

Don't belive either, that the grid would be availabe to the public.
Took over 20 years till the internet was open to the general public and there was nothing else then. Now everything is somehow connected to some kind of network, enough possibilities to get speed without the grid.

What I really disliked about the articel were the random thrown in numbers. 10000 times faster than what ?
Does the internet have a certain speed ?
And where are those 2 million servers ?!
Can't even belive there are 2 million facilities studying that stuff.

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 )

[Blackjack]

I read a similar article about this on Wired.com. It seems The Grid is intended for research purposes only and is not intended for public use. But the upside is that if you can talk your government into a 40 million dollar grant for research into atrox breeding habits, you might actually have a shot at getting access....

Blackjack

[Legion]

I very much believe we will be using the grid ourselves within some 15 years. Why? because everything sooner or later reaches the "market" so to speak, and it was the same with the internet before, we wouldnt get it but look.. were using it now.

[Vedder]

Ah the grid.

Yeah, there's a lot of potential in the grid for many things. Certainly interesting.
But it's not usable for real time on line games.

[Jorael]

old news... perhaps u should of searched before u posted...

The "Grid" is coming... Super fast Internet

[aridash]

an example of what happens when non-tech people write tech articles. reading between the lines, the reason its blazingly fast is because data is all stored in each local centre but distributed over t'internet to the others. fibre is fast but unless they've layed their own between each office then they will be on the same backbone net as the rest of us and subject to the same quality of service. The WWW is just an application layer on top of the network and the internet is a framework of interconnected networks so this would become the internet, not replace it.

Originally Posted by Legion

I very much believe we will be using the grid ourselves within some 15 years. Why? because everything sooner or later reaches the "market" so to speak, and it was the same with the internet before, we wouldnt get it but look.. were using it now.

very much so, but which "grid"? i've heard the term applied to several projects. the idea behind the Cell processor in the PS3 is to form a internetworking grid for utility computing (ie a huge distributed mainframe) which is a service already available from IBM (Cell partner/manufacturer, not that it necessarily uses Cell or PS3, but could potentially). it makes alot of sence for organisations with huge server farms to sell spare capacity and virtualisation facilitates this very easily, ie have a VM running "thegrid" that can use 50% of unused server capacity. I think a grid like topology is what makes Google work too. so we are already using it.

[Legion]

Originally Posted by Vedder

Ah the grid.

Yeah, there's a lot of potential in the grid for many things. Certainly interesting.
But it's not usable for real time on line games.

it might not be very usable for todays games but most likely in a few years when we will see streaming content and a lot higher resolutions etc etc in some 5-10 years.

Originally Posted by aridash

an example of what happens when non-tech people write tech articles. reading between the lines, the reason its blazingly fast is because data is all stored in each local centre but distributed over t'internet to the others. fibre is fast but unless they've layed their own between each office then they will be on the same backbone net as the rest of us and subject to the same quality of service. The WWW is just an application layer on top of the network and the internet is a framework of interconnected networks so this would become the internet, not replace it.



very much so, but which "grid"? i've heard the term applied to several projects. the idea behind the Cell processor in the PS3 is to form a internetworking grid for utility computing (ie a huge distributed mainframe) which is a service already available from IBM (Cell partner/manufacturer, not that it necessarily uses Cell or PS3, but could potentially). it makes alot of sence for organisations with huge server farms to sell spare capacity and virtualisation facilitates this very easily, ie have a VM running "thegrid" that can use 50% of unused server capacity. I think a grid like topology is what makes Google work too. so we are already using it.

true that i guess

[Vedder]

Originally Posted by Legion

it might not be very usable for todays games but most likely in a few years when we will see streaming content and a lot higher resolutions etc etc in some 5-10 years.
...

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.