An April 6 story (Coming soon: Superfast Internet) from TIMESONLINE, describes a new parallel Internet that will reportedly move information 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection. Called “the grid,” the network is being established by the Cern particle physics center, and will be launched for research purposes on “Red Button” day, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is switched-on. [image ((Kalmann, Marco. “Cern.” CernMarcokolmann’s Photostream. 29 Jan 2008. 8 Apr 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/marcokalmann/2228792089/.))]
The network is initially being built by Cern to handle that huge amounts of data that will be generated by the super collider, distributing it out to various research centers around the world. One of the goals of the collider will be to locate the Higgs Bison particle. You can look that one up for yourself.
There is no promise that “the grid” will ever become part of our household infrastructure, though information speeds like these will certainly be part of our future. It might be interesting to ask students, the inheritors of this future, to speculate on what they might do with connections capable of sending…
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I was lucky enough to meet the scientists behind this when I was in Geneva in February, just before they boarded it all up forever, burying the world’s biggest magnet so it can get on with hurtling this information around.
You can take part in the data analysis on your own computer in their volunteer computing project:
http://athome.web.cern.ch/athome/LHC/lhc.html
Mob-sourcing at its best. Thanks Ewan!
I imagine a general blending of television with the web and the complete removal of home video / dvd rental. No need for the disk when you can click and download the whole movie in half a second in high definition. Start shorting blockbuster stock now!
Wow…the future is truly amazing! Speed increases like this make you wonder what is going to be possible in the future for all of us and for our kids!