This Times Online story, with the promising title, “Coming soon: superfast internet”, hit the Digg top ten today. It sensationally introduces CERN’s academic grid computing network — officially known as the European Commission project, Enabling Grids for E-sciencE (EGEE) — as some type of shadow Internet that operates 10,000 times faster than the commercial Internet we all know and love, and will be coming soon to your ISP.
The reality is that private academic networks are nothing new, and have been in use for quite awhile. They are simply high speed networks reserved for academic research. They are not clogged by consumers surfing porn and downloading music and movies. In Canada, we have WestGrid, which is part of the nation-wide CAnet. Large corporations, such as Microsoft, also have “grids” of a sort; they call them virtual private networks.
Computing grids allow for the distribution of expensive computing resources across a wide geographical area. This allows, for example, a large parallel computing cluster to be maintained at one university while a large storage array is maintained at another, leveraging the resources of participating institutions. Scientists can then do computing on the cluster at one university and store the resulting data on the array at the other university. The imperative is that the network linking the two be fast enough to make this practical.
It is this imperative that makes it easy to see why home Internet users will not be using these grids to download the back catalogue of Rolling Stone. That would clog the tubes. What is interesting about grids is the idea of cloud computing.
Perhaps some day consumer ISPs will invest millions in ultra-high-speed networking equipment so that their customers can store all of their data on a remote server instead of at home, but still have lightening fast access to that data, as if it were at home. But it wouldn’t be; it would be out there, in the cloud.
Why would anyone want all of their personal data out there, in the cloud? Researchers are still trying to figure that one out…
