The Grid: Next-gen Internet 10,000 times faster than broadband
THE internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds.
At speeds about 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, “the grid” will be able to send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds.
The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the web, the grid could also provide the kind of power needed to transmit holographic images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.
David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University and a leading figure in the grid project, believes grid technologies could “revolutionise” society. “With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine,” he said.
The power of the grid will become apparent this summer after what scientists at Cern have termed their “red button” day - the switching-on of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe. The grid will be activated at the same time to capture the data it generates.
Cern, based near Geneva, started the grid computing project seven years ago when researchers realised the LHC would generate annual data equivalent to 56m CDs - enough to make a stack 40 miles high.
This meant that scientists at Cern - where Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1989 - would no longer be able to use his creation for fear of causing a global collapse.
This is because the internet has evolved by linking together a hotchpotch of cables and routing equipment, much of which was originally designed for telephone calls and therefore lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission.
By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data. The 55,000 servers already installed are expected to rise to 200,000 within the next two years.
Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project, said: “We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at Cern. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries.”
That network, in effect a parallel internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world.
One terminates at the Rutherford Appleton laboratory at Harwell in Oxfordshire.
From each centre, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions using existing high-speed academic networks.
It means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system – so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the internet from this autumn.
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.
“It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere,” he said.
Computers on the grid can also transmit data at lightning speed. This will allow researchers facing heavy processing tasks to call on the assistance of thousands of other computers around the world. The aim is to eliminate the dreaded “frozen screen” experienced by internet users who ask their machine to handle too much information.
The real goal of the grid is, however, to work with the LHC in tracking down nature’s most elusive particle, the Higgs boson. Predicted in theory but never yet found, the Higgs is supposed to be what gives matter mass.
The LHC has been designed to hunt out this particle - but even at optimum performance it will generate only a few thousand of the particles a year. Analysing the mountain of data will be such a large task that it will keep even the grid’s huge capacity busy for years to come.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be directly available to domestic internet users, many telecoms providers and businesses are already introducing its pioneering technologies. One of the most potent is so-called dynamic switching, which creates a dedicated channel for internet users trying to download large volumes of data such as films. 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.
Additionally, the grid is being made available to dozens of other academic researchers including astronomers and molecular biologists.
It has already been used to help design new drugs against malaria, the mosquito-borne disease that kills 1m people worldwide each year. Researchers used the grid to analyse 140m compounds - a task that would have taken a standard internet-linked PC 420 years.
“Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science,” Doyle said.
“Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate.
“The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.” (c) Times Online
Six decades after its birth, the global IT industry has grown into a trillion-dollar behemoth. But while India has played a stellar role in shaping the sector, its share in the pie is a minuscule three percent, say the authors of a new book.
"India showed that the characteristic of on-time and within-budget delivery is something that can be expected as the norm," said Priya Kurien, who has co-authored "Blind Men and The Elephant: Demystifying the Global IT Services Industry" with Was Rahman.
"More importantly, it has also been bringing in a much better success rate for the quality of project work delivered," said the Bangalore-based Kurien.
Yet at $18 billion (Rs.711 billion), the total revenue of India's IT services exports is still less than three percent of the total IT services pie.
"Therefore, while in India there is considerable hype and excitement about the role of the Indian IT industry, just from a contribution to the global pie, there is plenty more to be done," Kurien told IANS in an interview.
Tracing the six decades of global IT services, their Sage-India published book looks at the state of three giant global IT service organisations - IBM, EDS and Accenture - and the Indian challengers TCS, Infosys and Wipro.
Unable to find "books that gave us enough insights into the past of the IT services industry," the authors got the idea to write a book covering past, present and future of the sector.
"We certainly don't offer any predictions on where the industry will go, only possible scenarios that can play out and other factors that will have a major impact on the industry," they added.
India needs to learn some lessons in a hurry, they suggested. "Given India's fascination with the IT industry, we do think this will have more readers in India," said London-based Rahman.
Rahman is CEO and co-founder of Dolphin Advisory. He has spent a career advising business and technology executives on how to leverage the potential of IT. He has been involved with many corporate big names and a charter member of TiE UK.
Kurien is managing director of Dolphin Advisory. While at Insosys Technologies for a decade, she co-developed the firm's European Strategy and its Solutions Programme.
The authors say in terms of executive customer relationships, the largest IT services companies globally have expanded because they have very strong relationships at senior executive levels of their customers.
"Acquiring and managing such relationships is quite effort intensive and challenging. The top Indian players are doing this but the rest of the industry probably has things to learn on this aspect," Kurien pointed out.
Likewise, most Indian IT services firms have been riding on "Brand India" that seems to denote low-cost and high quality IT services to Western customers.
"The need for differentiation and uniqueness for each Indian player is something that will become the need of the hour as Indian firms begin to compete much more against each other than 'in-house' IT teams or Western competitors, as was the case in the past," said Rahman.
Large global players also know the value of a consortium to win the really big deals, for instance, with the US government or the UK National Health Service.
"Indian IT service providers have been growing so rapidly and since the market seems to be growing, collaboration and partnerships have not really been important thus far but will become increasingly so to win the larger deals," suggest the writers.
They argue that Nasscom (National Association of Software and Service Companies) numbers peg the Indian IT and ITeS industry to be employing over a million people. Even as a percentage of the total employment by the IT industry globally, this is a fairly high percentage.
"This number continues to rise year on year right now. As many people are part of this industry and aspire to be part of it, and are investing in building careers in it, we think it is useful and relevant for them to understand the past, present and the scenarios for the future of the industry," said Kurien.
According to Nasscom, last year the domestic spending in India was $8.2 billion. As a fraction of the global IT spending, this is still very small.
But it is beginning to grow with both large and SME businesses beginning to utilise IT. Not having constraints of legacy infrastructure, both types of businesses are leapfrogging generations of technology to begin with the latest available today, the authors say.
Indo-Asian News Service