The birthplace of the Web, Cern, which is based near Geneva, is now busy working on “the grid” that boasts speeds nearly 10,000 times faster than a typical Broadband connection, and that may soon render the Web obsolete. 

The grid computing project was started around seven years ago by researchers at Cern. They claim “the grid” is so fast it is capable of sending the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britain to Japan in less than two seconds. 

With that kind of computing power, future generations will be able to collaborate and communicate in ways that older people cannot even imagine, said Professor of Physics at Glasgow University and leading light of the project. 

Scientists at Cern intend to activate “the grid” this summer alongside what they term as ‘red button day’ when they will switch on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) or the new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the Universe. 

So what is “the grid”? Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of “the grid” project, said they need so much processing power that there would even be an issue as to getting enough electricity to run the computers — if they were all at Cern. Doyle said the only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centers in other countries. 

Doyle explained that that network, in effect a parallel Internet, is now built, using fibre optic cables that run from Cern to 11 centres in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe, and around the world. From each center, further connections radiate out to a host of other research institutions that use existing high-speed academic networks. Which means Britain alone has 8,000 servers on the grid system so that any student or academic will theoretically be able to hook up to the grid rather than the Internet from this autumn. 

What does the grid have that Internet doesn’t? While the Internet has been built by linking together a mesh of cables and routing equipment most of which lacks the capacity for high-speed data transmission, the grid, by contrast has been built with dedicated fibre optic cables and modern routing centres, ensuring there are no outdated components that manage to slow down the speed of data transmission. 

Commenting on the possibilities of the grid, Ian Bird, project leader, said grid technology could make the Internet so fast that people would stop using desktop computers to store information and entrust it all to the internet. Bird said it would lead to what is known as ‘cloud computing’, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere. 

The United States is ranked 7th worldwide in a Networked Readiness Index in a new report issued by the World Economic Forum. The index is based on a variety of economic and political as well as technical factors.

This is in contrast to last year’s OECD report, based on tighter criteria of bandwidth and connectivity, that ranked the United States 19th worldwide.

From a N.Y. Times article about the report:

An O.E.C.D. economist acknowledged the nuances in
taking into account government regulatory and related
factors, and said it was hard to draw a single
conclusion from the data. “I think we can say that a
lot of the situation in the United States is a result
of the lack of competition,” said Taylor Reynolds, an
economist in the Internet and Telecommunications Policy
section of the O.E.C.D. “In Europe we have adopted an
unbundling strategy wholeheartedly.”

That has led to more competition in markets outside the
United States, he said, which in turn has driven
Internet service providers elsewhere to offer speedier
service and lower prices.

One aspect of global competition that is being watched
closely, he added, is the way fiber optic networks are
being introduced in different regions. Even though the
United States has begun to accelerate the availability
of fiber optic services, it is lagging Europe and Asia
in network speeds.

While Verizon is offering 50 megabit FIOS in the United
States, 100 megabit services are common in Europe, and
the Japanese are offering 1 gigabit services.

Still, there are puzzling aspects to the American
market, which has higher broadband availability than
many countries but lower adoption rates. More customers
have retained dial-up services than most countries,
which might be explained by price or lack of attractive
broadband services.

The report concludes:

Establishing a pervasive and prosperous Internet culture
is as much about creating the right business environment
as it is about adopting the right technology. If governments-
national, regional, and municipal - want to
harness the potential of ICT, they must not only invest
in ICT infrastructure and the capabilities to support it,
but also be ready to modify their country’s relevant
institutional setting - or ICT ecosystem - to allow ICT
to yield its transformative powers.

By a wide margin, Verizon continues to be the most powerful force in the re-wiring of North America, leading other telephone companies, local exchange companies, towns, developers and cable multisystem operators in connecting homes to new services with 100 percent fiber-optic links. Those are the key findings of a newly released study by an independent group.

In its semi-annual study released Tuesday (April , the Fiber-to-the-Home Council reported that 11.8 million homes are passed by fiber-optic cables and 10 million can now be connected, while nearly 3 million already have service on fiber all the way to the home. In total, about 10 percent of all North American homes are passed by fiber cables, with FTTH growth running at 97 percent annually.

Verizon, the council said, leads the pace with more than 70 percent of the current total fiber connections. Cable operators have installed less than one percent of the total all-fiber services.

“Cable companies frequently claim in their ads that they have fiber just like Verizon,” said John Wimsatt, senior vice president of marketing for Verizon. “But this report, from an independent group, shows that the leader by miles in deploying fiber-optic technology all the way to customers is Verizon. No cable company even comes close to providing this level of service using this powerful, new technology.”

A 532nm, 50mW laser is shot through a stream of water. The amazing fiber optic internal reflective properties of water is exposed. Music by Kevin MacLeod.

Researchers at IBM recently announced a nanoscale silicon switch that can direct trillions of bits of data per second within an optical network. The switch could make it possible to incorporate the speed and bandwidth of a telecommunications network into a personal computer, say the researchers. This is an increasingly important goal for engineers as they look for the best design for future multicore machines–computers with more than one processing center.

The advance gives researchers more control over where bits are directed in an optical network smaller than a fingernail. “We’re talking about routing a terabit per second through a single switch,” says William Green, an IBM researcher who worked on the project. Such performance is comparable to what’s achieved by very large racks of mounted equipment for telecommunications fiber optics.

Today’s top-of-the-line computers come with two or four general processing cores, but within the next decade, engineers expect to build computers with tens of cores. One of the main problems with making a many-core machine is that it’s unclear how to let all the cores communicate efficiently with each other and with other components in the computer that lie off the chip, such as memory. Currently, all of this communication is conducted over metal wires that are etched into chips and circuit boards. But wires have an intrinsic resistance, which limits the speed of data. In addition, the flowing electrons can produce electrical interference and heat that can cause computation errors.

Optical devices and waveguides built into the same silicon used to make chips are promising alternatives to electronic components and metal wires. Within the past few years, there’s been a flood of activity in this field, known as silicon photonics, from IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, MIT, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California, to name a few. Researchers have steadily been creating ever more efficient silicon-based devices, such as lasers, modulators that encode data onto light, detectors, and filters that clean up signals as they travel through a network. In fact, Sun Microsystems was recently awarded a $44 million contract from the U.S. Pentagon to investigate approaches for replacing metal wires with beams of light.

While there are many pieces that are necessary for intracomputer optical networks, IBM’s switch announcement is an important step toward making such a system practical. “There have been a lot of advances in silicon photonics,” says Keren Bergman, a professor of electrical engineering at Columbia University, but IBM’s switch “is very important for being able to make optical networks on chips.” Because the device routes a number of different wavelengths of light to various parts of a chip or the system, engineers don’t need to build point-to-point waveguides to each destination in a system. “This enables you to generate and route photons to multiple destinations in a more efficient way,” Bergman says.