Grid Internet

While the web is a service for sharing information over the internet, the new system, Grid, is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the internet. At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, the grid will be able to send the entire Madona catalogue from Britain to India in less than two seconds The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, could also provide the kind of power needed to 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 . Grid technologies “could revolutionise society’’. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people cannot even imagine. The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button’’ day—the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates. 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 50 miles high. Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-sped computing project, said grid technology would make the internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet. “It will lead to what’s known as ‘cloud computing’ where people keep all their data online and access them from anywhere