The Internet, or ‘Interweb’ as my friends like to call it could soon be going the way of the typewriter or perhaps even the dinosaur. The buzz on the Internet is all about ‘The GRID’ nowadays. Forget Internet 2, the Grid is faster than that. Currently being developed by CERN, the particle physics laboratory that brought us Internet I, the GRID will be so fast it will allow you to download entire movies, music collections, and of course mathematical data for those geeky scientists at speeds to ridiculous it will make the Internet look, well, pretty pathetic.
Imagine being able to transmit holographic images; to allow instant gaming online with millions of players worldwide; or to offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call. This is the potential of the GRID as it is seen right now. And this is not some future project – years away. The GRID will become active this summer when scientists at the Large Hadron Collider project in Europe – underground somewhere probably around Switzerland – will switch it on in order to collect all the data they hope to get from smashing two particles together in an attempt to find the ‘god particle’. I won’t go into detail on that project but it’s pretty cool. Essentially they are hoping to find what’s been termed the ‘Higgs boson’ or the originator of all mass; basically the seed from which the theoretical big bang came from. Whether this was created by God or was a spontaneous random creation of something else is not part of their project. Scientists actually aren’t even the ones who coined the term ‘god particle’ and most of them actually reject that term in favor of ‘Higgs boson’, but I digress.
This network, or GRID, is currently being built using only fibre optic cables running from CERN to 11 centers in the USA, Canada, the Far East, Europe, and other places. By this autumn many people will be able to switch from the Internet to the GRID theoretically. Moore’s law continues unabated.