"The Grid" will replace Internet?

[Mammon]

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

This would be a very useful technological development, which could mutiple productivity of the global economy by hundreds of times.

[JRoberts]

This is really neat! Thank you for posting this .

The power of the human mind is indeed amazing.

[~Sophia~]

Wow!

[DarkWaters]

As a professional operations researcher (the science of using math to model and solve resource allocation problems), I am personally excited for the ongoing revolution from both high performance and high throughput computing. Before this advancement, there were numerous difficult decision problems (e.g., finding a minimum cost train dispatching schedule) that would have to be heuristically approached because no computer could compute an optimal solution in a reasonable amount of time. Now, some of these problems can be approached with basic enumeration algorithms that can be performed in parallel.

Of course, this will certainly not make advanced study in my field obsolete. Instead, this will allow logistics and scheduling experts to incorporate more complexity into their decision models, engage in longer term strategic planning or just tackle problems of larger scale.

So yes, I am very excited indeed.

Hopefully statists will not think that they finally have the computing power they need to make central planning work.

[Mammon]

Wow!

I know, I was surprised too when I saw Foxnews.com actually had a good article for there top most read instead of "Tranny Woman Teacher Rapes Hippo During Field Trip. Possibly Drugs Involved"

You get a little surprise everyday. Also, there is a wiki page on it. Not much though.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grid_%28t...ommunication%29

[LiberTodd]

Awesome, let's just hope they don't try to censor it.

[agrippa1]

Awesome, let's just hope they don't try to censor it.

If they don't, all our friends at FCC will be out of a job soon.

[DavidV]

This is a very ignorant and misleading article typical of mainstream news reporting of technology.

Fiber-optic connections already form the backbone of the Internet, and 1GB/s per second is a fraction of what the latest technologies allow. As of March 24th 2008, the fastest fiber optic transmission is 2.56 terabits per second, or over 2,560 times faster than "the Grid." Many dedicated intranets like “The Grid” carry traffic for particular applications.

The idea of "The Grid" "replacing" the Internet is absurd, as the 'net is not any specific technology or network, but a distributed network based on a stack of common protocols. The only thing that could replace the Internet is the introduction of a new network, running a new set of incompatible protocols - highly unlikely. It is economically impossible to replace the entire network with a new technology - it is like asking every single Internet-connected household and business to replace their phone/cable/fiber lines, networking technology, and computer hardware overnight. The success of the net is in fact due to its ability to unite different technologies (such as fiber optic and copper cable) with an evolving set of standards. So yes - unless something better comes along, you will probably get fiber to your house one day. However, it will be the same Internet, and it will have nothing to do with "The Grid."

Edited April 10, 2008 by GreedyCapitalist

[Mammon]

You know, David, I'm going to start calling you "Doom Monger" because every post I see of yours is usually discrediting the rest of the thread or subject on hand. But your probably right, I admit I don't know that much about it, just passing on what I'm told. Blame Fox News for the inaccuracy!

[DavidV]

You know, David, I'm going to start calling you "Doom Monger" because every post I see of yours is usually discrediting the rest of the thread or subject on hand.

It's probably because I post during breaks from work, usually when I'm frustrated with something and looking to blow off some steam.

[DragonMaci]

Fiber-optic connections already form the backbone of the Internet, and 1GB/s per second is a fraction of what the latest technologies allow. As of March 24th 2008, the fastest fiber optic transmission is 2.56 terabits per second, or over 2,560 times faster than "the Grid." Many dedicated intranets like “The Grid” carry traffic for particular applications.

Nowhere in the Fox News article did it mention 1Gb/s speeds. In fact what it said was "10,000 times faster than current technology". If 1Gb/s was true then it would be less than 10,000 times. 1Gb/s divided by 10,000 is 100Kb/s. Who has broadband internet that slow? Even in New Zealand, which has crappy broadband services the slowest is 256Kb/s and the average is over 1Mb/s. But more importantly current technologies for broadband connections range from 7Mb/s maximum to 100Mb/s maximum. 10,000 times that is 70Gb/s to 1Tb/s, not 1Gbps. That is 70 to 1000 times what you stated.

Also, that 2.56Tb/s is for the total speed of the cable not the broadband connection, which is what was being refered to, so the two are not comparable. The former will always larger than the latter.

[DavidV]

Nowhere in the Fox News article did it mention 1Gb/s speeds.

You're right, I don't know where I got this number - I may have Googled this number somewhere. I did notice this in the story just now:

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.

A DVD contains 4.7 or 8.5 GB of data, so a five second download is roughly consistent with 1GB/s.

Also, that 2.56Tb/s is for the total speed of the cable not the broadband connection, which is what was being refered to, so the two are not comparable. The former will always larger than the latter.

If you read the story, it says the accomplishment is "transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link." The total speed of a fiber-optic cable is just under the speed of light. The total bandwith is virtually unlimited, since photons are very small. In in practice it is limited by the frequency and data bus bandwidth of the transmission equipment.

Edited April 11, 2008 by GreedyCapitalist

[DragonMaci]

You're right, I don't know where I got this number - I may have Googled this number somewhere. I did notice this in the story just now:

A DVD contains 4.7 or 8.5 GB of data, so a five second download is roughly consistent with 1GB/s.

Then apparently "10,000 times the speed of current technology" is a blatent lie since current technology is not a mere 100Kbps.

If you read the story, it says the accomplishment is "transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link." The total speed of a fiber-optic cable is just under the speed of light. The total bandwith is virtually unlimited, since photons are very small. In in practice it is limited by the frequency and data bus bandwidth of the transmission equipment.

What I meant is the maximum speed achieved. For example, the Southern Cross Cable linking NZ to the rest of the world can only manage something like 100Gb/s to 200Gb/s as a maximum (though it will be upgraded to about 800Gb/s over the next few years). What I meant is that the 2.56Tb/s is the equivalent of that, not the speed user get. Even with the few cases of fivre optic broadband in NZ the maximum speed users get is 25Mbps.

[Steve D'Ippolito]

Be careful not to confuse 1GB/s with 1Gb/s--Byte versus bit. GreedyCapitalist computation was for bytes and must be multiplied by 8 to give the bit equivalent.

[DragonMaci]

Be careful not to confuse 1GB/s with 1Gb/s--Byte versus bit. GreedyCapitalist computation was for bytes and must be multiplied by 8 to give the bit equivalent.

I am not confusing the two. Actually I wopuld argue he was - first he said it with a capital B, meaning bytes, then he switched to a lower case b, meaning bits. That lack of consistency points towards him confusing the two. Also, the fact he used a capital B at all points at that - internet and netowrk speeds are measure in bits per second not bytes per second.

Besides, even with bytes, they would be lying - current technology is not maxed at 100KB/s either. That is just 800Kb/s. That is way less than the maximum of current technology, which actually reaches 100Gbps for internet and even faster still for networks.

[Jake_Ellison]

I remember reading the article when it was first published, and my impression a few lines in was that the author has no idea what the internet is, and I had a suspicion that him or his editor made up the headline and the first line, wich contains the part about replacing the internet. My suspicions were confirmed in this quote in the middle of the piece, when we firsrt hear from mr. Ian Bird:

"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."

I guess no one told him we're replacing the Internet with his network, huh? That silly geek still thinks his grid is just a technology that can be used to speed up the internet we have. Thank God for Foxnews "journalists" to set him straight.

[jmr]

"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."

This quote seems a bit odd. You can't put data "on the internet", the internet is just a means to transport data. You can put it on a server, but everyone does that already. I can connect to my network, my friends', my school's and my work's to access my data from anywhere already.