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By contrast, the grid has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, meaning there are no outdated components to slow the deluge of data.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
Showing posts with label technology in life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology in life. Show all posts
IN AUSCHWITZ the exposed-brick barracks sit in neat rows, in a calm so deep it must necessarily rise out of death. The tidy paths cut each other at right angles, and the trees are stately and still. The sweet boxy buildings could be town houses, or school blocks, or military quarters. Or killing factories that smoothly sucked in human beings, separated them from their clothes, their hair, their gold teeth, their reading glasses and their children, and then processed them in a furnace. The electrified barbed wire fences that run in straight lines held up by concrete pillars could have kept out unwanted intruders, or kept in helpless innocents.
The Nazis believed in the differences in men, and believed in the extermination of these differences. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz — and adjoining Birkenau — where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.
As you walk through those surreally peaceful double-storey blocks, you will invariably find yourself tailed or led by a crocodile of teenagers — scrubbed shining, brightly attired, speaking in hushed voices — winding their way through a byway of history to which they — and each one of us — are deeply connected. Round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out their children from all over the world to show them the beast that resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time.
There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.
There is nowhere in India that we enshrine our cruelty so that we can look at it and be dismayed and be afraid.
Well, read this special issue of TEHELKA and be dismayed and be afraid. Ashish Khetan’s extraordinary six-month investigation — one of the finest in the history of Indian journalism — peels off all kinds of masks, and shows us the beast in us. For five years since the carnage, we have heard charges and counter-charges. We have heard the victims, the government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups. Now for the first time hear the story of the killings from the men who did it. Put to rest your doubts about the foetus that was pulled out from its womb; about the systematic slicing of Ehsan Jafri’s limbs and torso; of the raping and chopping and burning of women and children; of law officers who turned on the victims; of the collusion of the police and the government.
Read it and be afraid.
One problem is we live in an age of spiralling hype and sensation.An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitised viewers set upon by a turbofuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything — lest we burst. This issue of TEHELKA, perhaps, can be a kind of litmus test. Read the following pages and see if you rediscover the meaning of some words — barbaric for one; for another, heartbreaking.
Read it and see if you can still be made afraid.
Of the many things that are uniquely appalling about Gujarat 2002, three are particularly disturbing. The first that the genocidal killings took place in the heart of urban India in an era of saturation media coverage — television, print, web — and not under the cloak of secrecy in an unreachable place. The second that the men who presided over the carnage were soon after elected to power not despite their crimes but seemingly precisely because of them (making a mockery of the idea of the inevitable morality of the collective). And finally — as TEHELKA’s investigation shows — the fact that there continues to be no trace of remorse, no sign of penitence for the blood-on-the-hands that — if Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are to be believed — is supposed to haunt men to their very graves.
Like Germany and Italy once, Gujarat begs many questions. How do a non-militant people suddenly acquire a bloodthirsty instinct? Does affluence not diminish the impulse to savagery? Does education not diminish the impulse to bigotry? Do the much-vaunted tenets of classical Hinduism not diminish the impulse to cruelty? If tolerance and wisdom will not flourish in a garden of well-being and learning, in the very land of Mahatma Gandhi, then is there any hope for these things at all?
Are we all, finally, only making a reckoning of differences and numbers? Would we all, given the advantage of numbers, and protection from the law, gleefully brutalise anyone who is different, or in disagreement? Today it is the overwhelming question in the mirror. Each of us needs to see it and to answer it. For the violence that bloomed so bloodily amid the Gujarati is also all around us. Every day brings news of a fresh mob attack, a fresh case of vigilante justice. The strong will tame the weak — if only law and order will look the other way for a moment.
Is it possible that contrary to all the hoopla we may have already lived out the high tide of our democracy? Many Indians may get richer and richer but as a people — a deep civilisation — we will now only get poorer and poorer? Is it possible that a country sprung from the vision of giants can now only sustain small men with small concerns? Once a few good men shaped a modern egalitarian nation out of a devastated colony; are there none now to staunch the rot?
FOR MORE than three years there has been a government at the centre that claims a legacy of the founding vision. Amazingly it has not once lifted a finger to alleviate the grief of Gujarat. There has neither been a display of the impartial steel of law and order, nor the soothing balm of any efforts of peace and reconciliation. Shining names like Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh present abject report cards — full of the desperate calculus of votes and seats; fully bare of any act of courageous morality. On the other hand, there is the bravery of the bigot: with élan Narendra Modi walks the talk and flings the gauntlet. And the idea of India dulls by the day.
Great leadership — power — is a complex duet of control and vision. India lives with a generation of politicians who at any given time only possess one of the two. The resulting catastrophes erupt around us like rash on an allergy.
Today India has a thousand mutinies awaiting an opportunity to violence, but this is the most important story of our time because the schism in Gujarat is the biggest slap in the face of the idea of India. We would do well to remember that there were once other contesting ideas to that of the liberal secular democracy. We would do well to remember nothing is forever. We could still become other things, the beast within us could still tear us apart — as has happened in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar — if we do not do what we need to do, if we do not look into the mirror and fix our face.
The face can neither be an angry snarl nor a glassy-eyed indifference. And it certainly cannot be the vacuous grin of the shining Indian. In equal parts it must reflect concern and memory and compassion. Read the following pages and know why. Read the following pages and be afraid.
The Nazis believed in the differences in men, and believed in the extermination of these differences. The imagination can never fully get around the horror of Auschwitz — and adjoining Birkenau — where in less than three years the Nazis gassed and incinerated nearly one-and-a-half million men, women and children, many no more than a few years old. In a world full of memorials to our creativity and genius, this is a memorial to the darkness that ever lurks in the heart of men.
As you walk through those surreally peaceful double-storey blocks, you will invariably find yourself tailed or led by a crocodile of teenagers — scrubbed shining, brightly attired, speaking in hushed voices — winding their way through a byway of history to which they — and each one of us — are deeply connected. Round the year, ceaselessly, the Jews ship out their children from all over the world to show them the beast that resides in us all. By their own long suffering they understand that the battle of life against death is the battle of memory against forgetting. That to not look the beast in the face is to have the beast on your back all the time.
There is nowhere in India that you can take your daughter if you wish to level her with the beast of Partition, the beast of the 1984 Sikh riots, the beast of a hundred communal and caste massacres, or the beast of Gujarat 2002. Because we do not remember, we repeat; because we do not look the evil in the eye, it dogs us all the time.
There is nowhere in India that we enshrine our cruelty so that we can look at it and be dismayed and be afraid.
Well, read this special issue of TEHELKA and be dismayed and be afraid. Ashish Khetan’s extraordinary six-month investigation — one of the finest in the history of Indian journalism — peels off all kinds of masks, and shows us the beast in us. For five years since the carnage, we have heard charges and counter-charges. We have heard the victims, the government, the police, the judiciary, and the civil rights groups. Now for the first time hear the story of the killings from the men who did it. Put to rest your doubts about the foetus that was pulled out from its womb; about the systematic slicing of Ehsan Jafri’s limbs and torso; of the raping and chopping and burning of women and children; of law officers who turned on the victims; of the collusion of the police and the government.
Read it and be afraid.
One problem is we live in an age of spiralling hype and sensation.An age of cheap spectacle in which the indulgences of sports and cinema can be so easily deemed landmark and historic. An age in which words like chilling, appalling, inhuman, outrageous, have all lost their charge. We are all desensitised viewers set upon by a turbofuelled media. Image is chasing image at such blistering speed that we dare not hold on to anything — lest we burst. This issue of TEHELKA, perhaps, can be a kind of litmus test. Read the following pages and see if you rediscover the meaning of some words — barbaric for one; for another, heartbreaking.
Read it and see if you can still be made afraid.
Of the many things that are uniquely appalling about Gujarat 2002, three are particularly disturbing. The first that the genocidal killings took place in the heart of urban India in an era of saturation media coverage — television, print, web — and not under the cloak of secrecy in an unreachable place. The second that the men who presided over the carnage were soon after elected to power not despite their crimes but seemingly precisely because of them (making a mockery of the idea of the inevitable morality of the collective). And finally — as TEHELKA’s investigation shows — the fact that there continues to be no trace of remorse, no sign of penitence for the blood-on-the-hands that — if Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are to be believed — is supposed to haunt men to their very graves.
Like Germany and Italy once, Gujarat begs many questions. How do a non-militant people suddenly acquire a bloodthirsty instinct? Does affluence not diminish the impulse to savagery? Does education not diminish the impulse to bigotry? Do the much-vaunted tenets of classical Hinduism not diminish the impulse to cruelty? If tolerance and wisdom will not flourish in a garden of well-being and learning, in the very land of Mahatma Gandhi, then is there any hope for these things at all?
Are we all, finally, only making a reckoning of differences and numbers? Would we all, given the advantage of numbers, and protection from the law, gleefully brutalise anyone who is different, or in disagreement? Today it is the overwhelming question in the mirror. Each of us needs to see it and to answer it. For the violence that bloomed so bloodily amid the Gujarati is also all around us. Every day brings news of a fresh mob attack, a fresh case of vigilante justice. The strong will tame the weak — if only law and order will look the other way for a moment.
Is it possible that contrary to all the hoopla we may have already lived out the high tide of our democracy? Many Indians may get richer and richer but as a people — a deep civilisation — we will now only get poorer and poorer? Is it possible that a country sprung from the vision of giants can now only sustain small men with small concerns? Once a few good men shaped a modern egalitarian nation out of a devastated colony; are there none now to staunch the rot?
FOR MORE than three years there has been a government at the centre that claims a legacy of the founding vision. Amazingly it has not once lifted a finger to alleviate the grief of Gujarat. There has neither been a display of the impartial steel of law and order, nor the soothing balm of any efforts of peace and reconciliation. Shining names like Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh present abject report cards — full of the desperate calculus of votes and seats; fully bare of any act of courageous morality. On the other hand, there is the bravery of the bigot: with élan Narendra Modi walks the talk and flings the gauntlet. And the idea of India dulls by the day.
Great leadership — power — is a complex duet of control and vision. India lives with a generation of politicians who at any given time only possess one of the two. The resulting catastrophes erupt around us like rash on an allergy.
Today India has a thousand mutinies awaiting an opportunity to violence, but this is the most important story of our time because the schism in Gujarat is the biggest slap in the face of the idea of India. We would do well to remember that there were once other contesting ideas to that of the liberal secular democracy. We would do well to remember nothing is forever. We could still become other things, the beast within us could still tear us apart — as has happened in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar — if we do not do what we need to do, if we do not look into the mirror and fix our face.
The face can neither be an angry snarl nor a glassy-eyed indifference. And it certainly cannot be the vacuous grin of the shining Indian. In equal parts it must reflect concern and memory and compassion. Read the following pages and know why. Read the following pages and be afraid.
Seven captive elephants in the Indian capital have been micro-chipped by an NGO as part of efforts to regulate the trafficking and exploitation of the animals.
"By micro-chipping the elephants, we can monitor and control the illegal trade and trafficking of captive elephants. Elephant traders and owners resort to capturing elephant calves from the wild and separate them from their herds." said Kartick Satyanarayan, co-founder of the NGO Wildlife S.O.S.
The micro-chipping was part of the Wildlife Week, which was celebrated during Oct 1-7 by conservationists, animal lovers and state governments across the country to reiterate their commitment to conservation of wildlife.
"With this, only four elephants now remain to be micro-chipped out of the total 31 captive elephants in Delhi," said Vasudha Mehta, communication officer of Wildlife SOS.
"The micro-chipping of the elephants was carried out under the guidance of D.M. Shukla, chief wildlife warden and conservator of forests, Delhi. The remaining four elephants will be micro-chipped this week." Mehta said.
S. Kumar, the Wildlife S.O.S veterinarian who has an exceptional record of working with elephants in states like Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Kerala, inserted the microchip in the elephants, Vasudha told IANS.
Information on each elephant and its owner has also been documented in the chip. As a result, veterinarians can know what disease an elephant has been suffering from. Any new elephants illegally captured from the forests can also be detected.
Delhi has 31 captive elephants that are used during religious ceremonies, weddings and other public functions. They had been living in the trans-Yamuna area of Delhi for the past many decades. But last year they had to relocate along with their owners in view of preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games to be held in the capital.
Micro-chipping is carried out for identification of animals, which involves a unique 12-digit identification tag for each elephant in the form of a transponder or chip.
The chip, which is the size of a rice grain, is planted under the subcutaneous layer of skin behind the elephant's ear. The transponder is detected through a special microchip reader, a scanning instrument.
The wildlife inspectors who supervised the micro-chipping procedure have instructed the owners to get their elephants examined by the Wildlife S.O.S veterinarian on a periodic basis for any health ailments.
"The owners are required to submit to us a quarterly health certificate duly signed by the veterinarian. This would ensure that the animals are not subjected to cruelty and exploitation," an official said.
Indo-Asian News Service
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