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Chongo · Apr 7, 2008, 04:02 PM

I heard a radio report this morning while listen to XM USA radio news that "The Grid" is expected to turned on this summer.
DVICE: 10,000x-faster Grid to begin embarrassing traditional Internet this summer

Right under our noses, those Swiss wizards have been creating The Grid, a worldwide data network that’s 10,000 times faster than the slow-poke Internet we know today. It’s happening at CERN, that hotbed of technology where Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee got his start.

Seven years in the making, the awash-in-cash Swiss built this network from scratch, using only the latest routers and dedicated fiber optic connections. They've already connected 55,000 servers to The Grid, with another 145,000 set to go online in the next two years.

Don’t hold your breath waiting to use it, though. It’s rolling out this summer, but first only to academic and research institutions. We’re hoping this new Internet 2.0 will be so fast, the current Internet will be embarrassed into speeding up, at least just a little.

Times Online, via CrunchGear

ort888 · Apr 7, 2008, 04:08 PM

Imagine the possibilities...

LOLcatz will be 10,000 times funnier, porn will come at us 10,000 times faster and we will be able to be jerkfaces at speed previously thought impossible!

The future is now people!

analogue SPRINKLES · Apr 7, 2008, 04:12 PM

At those speeds it could even render local storage and processing obsolete.

Chongo · Apr 7, 2008, 05:10 PM

The radio article even mentioned movies in under a minute.

- - e r i k - - · Apr 7, 2008, 05:32 PM

Huh?

Internet2 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Big Mac · Apr 7, 2008, 05:38 PM

Who else is imaging that whatever Internet 2 actually surfaces will be more or less locked down, DRM restricted and ad-laden?

- - e r i k - - · Apr 7, 2008, 05:55 PM

Internet2 has existed as a high-speed network for academic institutions since the late nineties. This is nothing new. So yes, it is locked down, but there is no DRM or ads. Duh.

About Internet2

- - e r i k - - · Apr 7, 2008, 05:59 PM

And regarding "The Grid"

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

"The Grid" is a fiber-optic network designed by CERN for academic pursuits surrounding the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was designed to deal with the massive quantity of data created by the LHC that would not have been supportable using standard network capabilities. This network will supposedly present speeds 10,000 times that of the standard internet framework.

Criticism
The Grid is being presented by reporters and the official website in breathless tones as a new and revolutionary approach to networking involving distributed computing and unnamed breakthroughs in networking, but the most technical documents on their site present concepts that have been in active use for decades. They say nothing about what technology used for transmission of the data (though they've settled on a speed figure and claim tens of thousands of servers), though the 10 petabytes a year generated by LHC (which they claim is the driving force behind its creation) can be transmitted over a mere OC12 connection to the internet, of the type used by small regional ISPs. The distributed computing they vaguely describe is already in use in millions of PCs in projects like folding@home and SETI@Home.

They use phrases like "The Grid" has potential to be the building block upon which an entirely new internet could be designed.[1]
but unfortunately, there is no definite explanation of the "block" or the "building," or how the entire process would work.

Lot of smoke and no fire here people.