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Web Spawns Grid & All Will Change Sydney Morning Herald - 7-7-3 1 In two weeks' time scientists in Geneva will throw the switch on the biggest development in global communication since Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Internet, scrawled "www" on a blackboard in 1989. They will announce that 10 laboratories around the world can now talk to each other through their computers. 2 In the age of high-speed digital communication, this may not seem revolutionary. But this small step for computerkind marks the launch of a new technological concept - the next generation of the Web. It is called the Grid, and scientists say that before long it will change everything we do, from scientific research to business. 3 The internet now consists of huge servers that contain information on Web pages that is then downloaded on to computers. As a user, you are limited in what you can do with that information by how much memory or processing power your own computer has. Under the Grid, the power of your machine - all those gigabytes, RAM and gigahertz - will become irrelevant. No matter how primitive and cheap your computer, you will have access to more power than now exists in the Pentagon. 4 "You just say I want this information and the Grid goes out and collects it for you," said Roger Cashmore, director of research at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory, near Geneva. The backbone of the Grid will be computer centres filled with thousands of PCs linked together. 5 Users will be able to use the programs, processing power or the storage they need as if it all existed on their own computer. And it is seamless - a user could be sitting tapping into a handheld computer on a train in England, using an application on a computer in the United States and storing files in Thailand and still have unlimited computer power.
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