We live in fascinating times!
Selma ----- Original Message ----- Sent: Thursday, July 03, 2003 2:20 AM Subject: Welcome to the grid: unlimited PC power at your fingertips http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,990086,00.html Welcome to the grid: unlimited PC power at your fingertips Next generation of web is supercomputer network accessible across the world Alok Jha, science correspondent Thursday July 3, 2003 The Guardian, London In two weeks' time scientists in Geneva will throw the switch on the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the internet, scrawled "www" on a blackboard in 1989. They will announce that 10 laboratories around the world, including one near Didcot in Oxfordshire, can now talk to each other through their computers. In the age of high-speed digital communication this may not seem revolutionary. But this small step for computer kind marks the launch of a new technological concept - the next generation of the web. It is called the grid, and scientists say that before long it will change everything we do - from scientific research to business to tackling fires to booking holidays, and even to the way we watch and craft movies. The internet currently consists of huge servers which contain information on web pages that is then downloaded onto computers. As a user, you are limited in what you can do with that information by how much memory or processing power your own computer has. Under the grid, the power of your machine - all those gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz - will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap your computer, you will have access to more power than currently exists in the Pentagon. "You just say I want this information and the [grid] is set up so that it goes out and collects that for you and makes it accessible," says Roger Cashmore, director of research at the European particle physics laboratory (Cern) near Geneva. The backbone of the grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. Users will be able to use the programs, processing power or the storage they need as if it all existed on their own computer. And it is seamless -a user could be sitting tapping into their handheld on a train in England, using an application on a computer in the US and storing files in Thailand and still have unlimited computer power at their disposal. It will be a while before the grid has any impact on our lives. Like the web, the grid is being developed to help scientific research. Cern is currently building the large hadron collider (LHC), an enormous microscope to investigate the properties of matter. The LHC will produce phenomenal amounts of data as it accelerates protons to near the speed of light and smashes them together. Over a year, it will produce some 500-800 million gigabytes of data. It would take a pile of CDs the height of the Eiffel tower to store that, says Mr Cashmore. To make any use of this mountain of information, scientists need a way to analyse and filter out what is useful and what can be tossed aside. To do that, huge quantities of computing power are needed. That is where the grid comes in. "In a nutshell, the vision [for the grid] is you describe what the input data should be, where you want the output to go and what you want to happen on this data," says Ian Bird, one of those responsible for deploying the grid at Cern. Once the request has been submitted to the grid, specifically designed software - the resource broker - gets on the job. The resource broker acts as a user's agent on the network, picking out the best places to carry out the necessary work at the best prices and making sure everything runs smoothly. Like stocks and shares, computer power becomes a commodity: users can buy it whenever they need it. Bob Jones, a grid project manager who was at Cern when the original web was invented, talks of applications in biology - ever more genomes are being sequenced producing piles and piles of information. The grid is the perfect way of analysing and sharing that data, he says. Like the electrical grid - which gives the system its name - the computing power will become available on demand. But it is about more than particle physics. A small handheld computer, connected by mobile phone to the internet, would become a supercomputer. Movies could be edited and watched on it. It could access a word processor that is stored on a computer somewhere in cyberspace. For the public to get access to the grid, it needs to be publicly available. The European Union is already considering a project to develop a network of computers available to the public. In Liverpool yesterday, a �2m European grant was announced to build a research centre next to the Catholic cathedral which will develop business uses for the grid. Dennis Kehoe, Liverpool University's Saxby professor of e-business, says he is working on ways to use it to solve everyday problems. "Say you are trying to plan how you deliver beer to all the pubs and clubs in the north-west of England or how you deliver social care to all the people in mid-Wales. Those are incredibly complex scheduling problems," said Professor Kehoe. It has other uses, too. Having the power of several supercomputers at its disposal, a small architecture company could model buildings far more complex than any technology it could afford now. An example of the type of application already under consideration is the proposed FireGrid. Malcolm Atkinson, director of the national e-science centre in Edinburgh, which is co-ordinating the effort to develop grid applications in the UK, says there are two things you need to do quickly in a fire. First, people have to be evacuated. Second, firefighters need to know where to go, in and outside the building. If firefighters are getting information from detectors inside, computers can model how the fire will spread and help firefighters tackle the blaze. It took eight years for the internet to catch on, says Bob Jones. This time, governments and scientists are already on board, so the results will be seen far quicker. "It'll be like the web," said Mr Jones."When you have it you'll wonder how you ever got by without it." _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
