Saturday 24 May 2008

The Worldwide Grid: The Next Level of Internet?

About 7000 CERN scientists at the LHC will use the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid to share data over the net. Grid computing is already being used in several other projects, e.g. weather forecasting.

As LHC begins to work, data will be tranferred to 11 large servers (linked with 200 smaller centres worldwide) at rates of up to 10 gigabits/second. CERN is linked with the 11 large hubs via fibre-optic links but the smaller centres use research networks and "common" internet. It is able to tranfer 2.3 terabytes, i.e. 2.3 million million bytes in a week and will handle the 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually planned to be generated by the LHC.

These large Grids are likely to substitute the previously planned supercomputers. The SETI programme (SETI @ home), Carl Sagan's brainchild, has already provided evidence for successful use of multiple PCs in completing a single task. The SETI programme has incidently set up an Arthur C Clarke tribute page.

The real difference between the Internet and the Grid is that the Grid not only shares information like internet, but is also able to allow sharing of computing resources (e.g. computing power, storage, running of programmes).

However, publically available (Read: for most of you and me) use of such high speeds, with immensely fast download speeds (about 10,000 times faster than today's broadband speeds), is possibly sometime in the future. This has some interesting parallels with the evolution of Asimov's multivac.


The word "Grid" is akin to its use in electricity grid and was used for the first time in a book by Ian Foster and Carl Kesselman (see their second book above).

Some of these Grids resemble maps for metros/local city trains and the current plans are almost worldwide. For such a high-speed, dedicated network, security is a major concern [not unlike some of the newly weds who key-in a padlock and throw the key in to the Tiber :-)]. But seriously, it is absolutely vital that this data is safe from any prying hackers.

Photo courtesy of Brunico Bridge Padlocks: Peter Casier.

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