The London Times has an atrocious article about how “the grid” may soon make the Internet obsolete:
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.
They seem to be falling into the trap of thinking of the Internet as a bunch of wires. In fact, the Internet is basically just an algorithm for routing packets, so a replacement would have to be a new, better way to route packets. That’s not apparently what they’re talking about here. (I say “apparently,” because it’s not at all clear what they actually are talking about.)
The idea of grid computing (decentralized networked computing ventures, often consisting of volunteers) seems like a good way to handle the amount of data they expect to generate at the Large Hadron Collider, but it’s hardly new.
So what is new? If we assume that there’s anything to do this article at all, the CERN guys are facing the problem of getting their data out to their grid participants. (In most grid applications, such as SETI@Home, participants conduct large computations on small amounts of data, so this isn’t an issue.) Here, a colleague tells me, they’re talking about a content delivery network using some dedicated bandwidth.
Sounds like a fine approach, but not a replacement for the Internet. (In fact, they probably use IP to route packets over their network, which would make it actually part of the Internet.) Semantics aside, it also doesn’t sound like something that will have any impact on most people lives, since the people who paid for the dedicated bandwidth are unlikely to let people use it to download films.
(ASIDE: What would be great would be if someone were to come up with a way for ordinary people to exploit the grid computing paradigm. . .)
Internet Scofflaw 