10,000 times Faster than internet

http://biotech-geek.com/blog2/2008/04/08/the-grid-10000-times-faster-internet/

Wow, that will be interesting.

THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.

At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.

The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid 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.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes 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 like me cannot even imagine,” he said.

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 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By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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.

One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.

From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.

It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.

Ian Bird, project leader for Cern’s high-speed computing project, said grid technology could 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 information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.

Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.

The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.

The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.

Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. In theory this would give a standard desktop computer the ability to download a movie in five seconds rather than the current three hours or so.

Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.

It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.

“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.

“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”

[Web moderator]

Yes, even fibre optic cables will supposedly give over 1 GBPS, which is a lot faster.

the days of Dial-Up are comming to the end! Celebrate! 

With most of the world still not even capable of running broad band unfortunately it's going to be a long time before something like this will be seen by the likes of us.  But still nice to see something out there exists.

well, the internet was born as a network between educational institutions, and reached general use in (if memory serves) about 30 years. On the other hand, it didn't have competition- this new technology, while faster, would need to compete with the existing network infrastructure, and the upgrade costs to both institutions, internet service providers and consumers will likely be an unfrontable bill to most.

If, however, they can make information on this new network available on the internet (albiet, of course, with a slower delivery) then it would be more interesting to implement a connection via the new network- and we can see a adoption method similar to the early ARPAnet. research facilities, Military, educational, corporate, and finally consumer.

yet a good number of ISPs are already using fiber optics, but its probably not at the speed that CERN is developing, and another factors in. is the fiber optics going to be Serial or Parallel transmission, since Parallel has its benifits in speed.

since Parallel has its benifits in speed.

No it doesn't. Even light has Signal skew and jitter. Why do you think were moving to Serial ATA as opposed to Parallel ATA?

oh wait, yea you also have to factor in the frequency of the data transmission.

and BC i just figured that parallel is faster since LPT is about 1Mbps compared to COM's speed of like something in the Kilobit range.

oh wait, yea you also have to factor in the frequency of the data transmission.

and BC i just figured that parallel is faster since LPT is about 1Mbps compared to COM's speed of like something in the Kilobit range.

No it isn't. The implementation of the Serial port is from  the original IBM-PC.

Parallel connections in general suffer from several problems, the biggest being signal skew and jitter. Skew and jitter are the reasons high-speed parallel buses such as SCSI (small computer systems interface) are limited to short distances of 3 meters or less. The problem is that, although the 8 or 16 bits of data are fired from the transmitter at the same time, by the time they reach the receiver, propagation delays have conspired to allow some bits to arrive before the others. The longer the cable, the longer the time between the arrival of the first and last bits at the other end! This signal skew, as it is called, prevents you from running a high-speed transfer rate or a longer cable—or both. Jitter is the tendency for the signal to reach its target voltage and float above and below for a short period of time.





With a serial bus, the data is sent 1 bit at a time. Because there is no worry about when each bit will arrive, the clocking rate can be increased dramatically. For example, the top transfer rate possible with EPP/ECP parallel ports is 2MBps, whereas IEEE-1394a ports (which use high-speed serial technology) support transfer rates as high as 400Mbps (about 50MBps)—25 times faster than parallel ports. USB 2.0 supports transfer rates of 480Mbps (about 60MBps), which is about 30 times faster than parallel ports, and the new IEEE-1394b (FireWire 800) ports reach transfer rates as high as 800Mbps (or about 100MBps), which is about 50 times faster than parallel ports!

At high clock rates, parallel signals tend to interfere with each other. Serial again has an advantage because, with only one or two signal wires, crosstalk and interference between the wires in the cable are negligible.

In general, parallel cabling is more expensive than serial cabling. Besides the many additional wires needed to carry the multiple bits in parallel, the cable also must be specially constructed to prevent crosstalk and interference between adjacent data lines. This is one reason external SCSI cables are so expensive. Serial cabling, by comparison, is very inexpensive. For one thing, it has significantly fewer wires. Furthermore, the shielding requirements are far simpler, even at very high speeds. Because of this, transmitting serial data reliably over longer distances is also easier, which is why parallel interfaces have shorter recommended cable lengths than do serial interfaces.

For these reasons—in addition to the need for new Plug and Play external peripheral interfaces and the elimination of the physical port crowding on portable computers—these high-performance serial buses were developed. USB is a standard feature on virtually all PCs today; is used for most general-purpose, high-speed external interfacing; and is the most compatible, widely available, and fastest general-purpose external interface. In addition, IEEE-1394 (more commonly known as FireWire), although mainly used in certain niche markets—such as connecting DV (digital video) camcorders—is also spreading into other high-bandwidth uses, such as high-resolution scanners, external hard drives, and networking.

source- Upgrading and Fixing PCs 15th Edition

Thanks for the lesson BC.

lol 

I herd about that.  Also.. thing freezing screen thing... its caused from your computer trying to handle too much internet data? That might be the answer to my problems!

[Moderator]

I herd about that.  Also.. thing freezing screen thing... its caused from your computer trying to handle too much internet data? That might be the answer to my problems!

Nope...that's not it.

I cant beleive some people still have dial up. Actually most people in my small town do. Rarely do I hear of people having broadband

My grandma has a computer with no internet! She needs help setting up aol cause its free now.