The "GRID"

[wpshooter]

I was reading an article about the "GRID" possibly someday replacing the current WWW/Internet.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,347212,00.html


IF (notice I said if), this ever takes place, will this be just basically infrasture/hardware changes or will there be any changes in the basic software structure(s) on the GRID/Internet ?

Thanks.

 

[Markbnj]

That was an interesting article. I read the same one, probably. Forget where it was linked though. Probably slashdot. If you still have it consider editing the link into your message.

I don't think your question necessarily makes the right comparisons, though the tech media was doing the same thing. There's two related but different concepts involved: high-speed communications and distributed processing.

The web as we know it, in terms of a standard for encoding information, will be around for a long time. But it will probably transition over time to a higher-speed backbone, and we already see a lot of developments in that area. The top protocol layer will likely remain http, but the underlying transport will evolve.

Then there is the problem the scientists behind GRID have, which concerns high-speed data transmission as a side-effect, but is directly concerned with distributing the processing of CPU/IO intensive tasks to many different processes on a network. They need this because it is no longer cost-efficient, or possibly even effective, to put enough supercomputing resources onsite to handle the output of something like the LHC.