In two weeks’ time scientists in Geneva will throw the switch on the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Internet, scrawled ”www” on a blackboard in 1989. They will announce that 10 laboratories around the world 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 that contain information on web pages that is then downloaded on to 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, memory 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 in 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 programmes, 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 a 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 his or her disposal.
It took eight years for the Internet to catch on, says Bob Jones, a grid project manager who was at Cern when the original Web was invented. This time, governments and scientists are already on board, so the results will be seen far quicker. ”It’ll be like the Web,” said Jones. ”When you have it you’ll wonder how you ever got by without it.” — Â