The Grid

Supercomputers to speed up internet | The Australian

Scientists at CERN, where the world wide web was invented, created the euros 500 million Grid because they realised that a single computer would not be able to cope with the amount of data the LHC is expected to produce each year - 15 petabytes, or 15 million gigabytes, which would fill 20 million CDs.

So CERN and the Large Hadron Collider means so much more in the long term. The Grid is being developed so that the massive amount of data the LHC will collect can be processed, but the rollout of the Grid will eventually lead to a hyper delivery of processing power to homes. As with the Internet, it was developed by scientists and then slowly trickled to homes. I can imagine this coming more quickly into homes because so many millions of people are now hooked up to the Net and the capabilty of the Grid to really change our lives technologically is there. It's a world we have seen in sci-fi but it is coming closer to us now. Everything will be instant. No more waiting and I'd like to think the endless updates which stall my computing will be in the background and out of my face.