GRID internet technology & Large Hadron Collider

Grid internet- The latest spin-off from Cern, the particle physics centre that created the internet, is an upcoming technology will make internet 10,000 times faster The grid could also provide the power needed to send sophisticated images; allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players; and offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call.

CERN is going to recreate the big bang to investigate how the universe began. For this they have made a machine called Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The LHC is designed to collide two counter rotating beams of protons or heavy ions. Proton-proton collisions are foreseen at energy of 7 TeV per beam.

• The beams move around the LHC ring inside a continuous vacuum guided by magnets.
• The magnets are superconducting and are cooled by a huge cryogenics system. The cables conduct current without resistance in their superconducting state.
• The beams will be stored at high energy for hours. During this time collisions take place inside the four main LHC experiments.

It planned to circulate the first beams in May 2008. First collisions at high energy are expected mid-2008 with the first results from the experiments soon after. The grid will be turned on at the same time to store the information it generates, after scientists at Cern, based near Geneva, realised that this will produce enough data each year to fill 56 million CDs. The data cannot be stored locally. It needs a network capable of handling and analysing enormous amounts of data — which explains the need of a grid.

Grid is a service for sharing computer power and data storage capacity over the Internet.in this syatem the computers around the world are connected to act as a single, huge and super-powerful computer. One thing is to remember is that the computers may belong from different people and also from different institutions like companies universities hospitals individual users.

The Grid, thus, has been under construction for the past seven years. It is a kind of parallel internet, comprising 55,000 servers connected to each other using fibre-optic cables and modern routers. It is expected that the servers will be around 2 lakhs in numbers within 2 years.

Advantages of grid

You would no longer need to install the program on your machine. Instead, you could just ask the Grid to run it remotely on your colleague's computer. Or if your colleague's computer was busy, you could ask the Grid to copy the program to another computer that was sitting idle somewhere on the other side of the planet, and run your program there. And if you needed to analyse a lot of data from different computers all over the Globe, you could ask the Grid to do this. Again, the Grid could find out where the most convenient source of the data is without you specifying anything, and do the analysis on the data wherever it is.

And if you wanted to do this analysis interactively in collaboration with several colleagues around the world, the Grid would link your computers up so it felt like you were all on a local network. This would happen without you having to worry about lots of special passwords, the Grid could figure out who should be able to take part in this common activity.

The Grid is said to have the potential to offer everything from high density (HD) video telephony to the transmission of holographic images. Downloading music should not take more than 5 seconds. Experts say the Grid will also lead to ‘Cloud Computing’ — where users store all data online.