By Claire Witham
First there was the internet. Now there is the Grid, the world's largest network of computers.
The Grid connects computers across the world to create a giant supercomputer. This can be accessed from anywhere on the planet at any time.
"The Grid will revolutionise the way science works," Professor David Britton told the BA Festival of Science on Friday.
A real-time display of the Grid working was demonstrated to visitors to the Festival of Science. This showed nearly 100 sites processing tens of thousands of different tasks. Last year almost 50 million hours of computing time were carried out on the Grid.
Rather than requiring expensive supercomputers at separate sites, the Grid links more than one hundred thousand processors at hundreds of institutions. This allows scientists from different countries to access data, analyse it and work together on international projects.
Grid computing has been called the next step for the Internet. Instead of PCs on the Internet being used to access websites, a PC on the Grid can be used by others for its computing power and data storage. Data from a project in the UK could be stored in Spain and processed in the USA without the individuals ever knowing.
The Grid is fundamental to the operation of the world’s biggest experiment that starts next year in Switzerland. The 27km-long Large Hadron Collider at the particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva will smash together hundreds of millions of particles a second. Scientists hope that this will recreate the conditions in the early Universe just after the Big Bang.
The amount of data created every year by the experiment will be the same as a stack of CDs three times the height of Mount Everest. To handle this vast amount of information scientists in the UK and Geneva have spent ten years creating the Grid.
More than five thousand computers in the UK are already linked to form the UK Grid for particle physics. This network known as GridPP was the prototype for the global Grid.
"The Grid has already been used for a wide range of scientific projects, from the search for new vaccines for malaria to analysis of oil and gas fields," explained Professor Britton who is the project leader of GridPP.
Although there are some data security issues, the Grid is already changing the way that scientists work and could be the next the revolution in computing. Like the Internet it also may change the way that we live.