[samwoo2go]

Taken from Bimmerfest
http://www.bimmerfest.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=276257

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contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347212,00.html

[samwoo2go]

This means you could download every porn ever made in a week...if you want

[Gearcraft]

kinda scary. it can also be used one day to track every person down (figuratively) and maybe project some kind of a beast that everyone will be forced to worship. ^_^

[TheLegacy]

sounds awesome... Hail skynet

[darkcloud]

It will be like the movie minority report. Your eye retina will identify you every where. Walk into a store and your eyes get scanned and it will know your entire shopping history and what you may need to replace. Kinda crazy.

[CRZ410S]

Imagine the difficulty in implementing a world wide hardware change to work on the new system???

[Neurorad]

Hard to believe the internet is less than 20 years old.

With the grid, working at home will be the norm; glad I have a home office.

I was going to buy a new wireless-N router, but I think I'll just wait for the wireless grid.

[darkcloud]

Originally Posted by Neurorad

Hard to believe the internet is less than 20 years old.

With the grid, working at home will be the norm; glad I have a home office.

I was going to buy a new wireless-N router, but I think I'll just wait for the wireless grid.

The wireless-N routers aren't all their cracked up to be. I picked one up and don't really notice a difference over wireless-G. Then again I don't stream much data between computers either.

[Gearcraft]

have you guys heard of networking through electrical outlets? i read it somewhere i just dont remember where.

[just4kickz]

Originally Posted by TheLegacy

sounds awesome... Hail skynet

skynet has control ovr our nukes, oh noes.

[TheLegacy]

Originally Posted by Gearcraft

have you guys heard of networking through electrical outlets? i read it somewhere i just dont remember where.

A number of years back my fam bought a device to to make the electrical outlet into a phone jack, RJ and plug direcTV into it.

[L8Apex]

Let me guess, Al Gore invented this too.

[nusevad]

If the grid does launch, its a great potential to make alot of money.

[sinnet112]

Originally Posted by Gearcraft

have you guys heard of networking through electrical outlets? i read it somewhere i just dont remember where.

Had it in my house. Convenient if you don't have wireless, but otherwise slow as anything.

[shiggy]

Originally Posted by TheLegacy

sounds awesome... Hail skynet

[Gearcraft]

Originally Posted by sinnet112

Had it in my house. Convenient if you don't have wireless, but otherwise slow as anything.

i thought it was faster. not even between home computers?

[sinnet112]

Originally Posted by Gearcraft

i thought it was faster. not even between home computers?

I had a few Netgear ones, but it was a few years ago. Technology may have changed but back then, it was a max of 600 kbps.

[Comet]

I got the Linksys Wireless N router
it's pretty fast...

Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.

yah.. there is more porn online than that...

[asdflkijd]

Originally Posted by darkcloud

It will be like the movie minority report. Your eye retina will identify you every where. Walk into a store and your eyes get scanned and it will know your entire shopping history and what you may need to replace. Kinda crazy.

God damn... does that mean no more shop lifting??

[Neurorad]

Originally Posted by Gearcraft

have you guys heard of networking through electrical outlets? i read it somewhere i just dont remember where.

Several manufacturers have them now.

http://www.netgear.com/Solutions/Hom...etworking.aspx

[OC Guy]

Powerline technology is old.

The grid stuff is pretty insane.

Stop the O-T banter about your wireless N products. lol