Goodbye Web. Hello Grid.
Last Updated on Sunday, 6 April 2008 11:50 Written by admin Sunday, 6 April 2008 10:43
CERN scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. 19 years later, CERN has created its replacement, the Grid, which moves data at speeds about 10,000 times faster than the typical broadband connection. For example, imagine downloading an entire feature film in seconds or playing HALO 3 with, say, 200,000 other players simultaneously.
The Grid is part of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider project, the world’s largest particle accelerator.
“The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.”
The Grid came about because of the almost unimaginable power requirements of the LHC. A recent Times article explains:
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs – enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern – where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 – would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
The other Tier 1 centers include:
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[...] introducing The Supernet! from the inventors of the internet comes: THE GRID [...]
RESPECTED SIR ,,,PLZ TELL ME SCIENTIFICALLY,THAT HOW WE WOULD BE ABLE TO KNOW ABOUT THE BIRTH OF NATURE BY DOING THIS EXPERIMENT