New Grid Could Replace Internet, 10,000 x Faster Than Broadband

If you thought your cable broadband connection and DSL were fast, then you're in for a treat.

If you thought your cable broadband connection and DSL were fast, then you're in for a treat. The new 'Grid' which is expected to make the Internet obsolete will have the capability to download movies, music catalogues, and databases in seconds. At speeds of 10,000 times faster than broadband, "the grid" which was created by scientists at Cern, the center for experimental physics, will become a web of its own.

According to reports, "The Grid" will be able to provide enough 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.

The lightning-fast Grid will become visible sometime this summer after scientists at Cern decide for their "red button" day in which they'll switch-on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which is a 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.

The grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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. Already, Great Britain has more than 8,000 servers on the grid system, and users will be able to hook up to the grid rather than the Internet as early as this fall.

According to Ian Bird, project leader for CERN’s high-speed computing project, 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. Users would use the new "Cloud computing" as a common way to organize personal and private information that would be stored on the Grid and accessible from any where.

The Grid will allow thousands of Research Centers, Universities, etc. share their data storage resources and computing power transforming the Internet into a giant global "Super Computer" and building capacity for the science of tomorrow.