The Grid Beats the Internet

The folks who brought us the Internet have been hard at work designing, constructing and linking together a new data transmital and processing network they have aptly named The Grid.

The Grid will be faster, more powerful and operate on dedicated modern hardware. But it was built for a scientific purpose, not for our amusement. So even though it could load a feature film down to your desktop in a matter of seconds, in the beginging the Grid will be busy contemplating the origins of the Universe.

A few simple parallels jump to mind. My first thought is that it sounds like The Matrix, of film fame, or the Skynet system from Terminator 2. Friend and fellow blogger Dave Kranz mentioned that he read that there were concerns that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the partical accelerator which will be generating the data that may reveal to us the origins of our Universe, may also create a black hole into which we will all disappear.

But I try not to be so afraid of gaining knowledge. Look how well we've down with fire and the wheel.

Anyway, the parallel which seems most frightening to me rests more in a comparison to our families purchases of desktop computers over the years. Each time we buy a new computer, we add on more and more memory and hard drive capacity. We do this, thinking that it will speed up processing, but then we discover that the newest software is five times larger and so, within a year our new computer runs just as slow as the old one.

So I'm wondering...once the superfast Grid lights up, will the heavy processing, massive data generating LHC slow it right back down to the same old Internet speed we all love to hate?

We'll find out this summer on "red button" day when both the Grid and the LHC are juiced into action.