The New Internet

Internet 2 - Son of Internet

The Internet is full of hackers, spam, weblogs, paedophiles, Counter Strike fraggers, pirated MP3's, streaming porn, eBay bargains, 419 fraud, amateur web cams, IM chat and voice over IP. When we were struggling with our dial up modems just a few short years ago, all we could think of was finding a way to increase the bandwidth to our own connection to the Internet.

Now more and more of the world has broadband (60% of users in the US have it and 95% of households in the UK) and suddenly we have discovered that broadband is like driving a McLaren F1 on the M25. Theoretical top speed is no use to you when the rest of the traffic is grid-locked. What we need to do is upgrade the Internet itself, not just our connection to it. In other words, we need some serious lane widening.

Dull technology journalists have taken to dubbing this 'Internet MKII' but the beardy boffin's behind it all have much cooler sounding names for their projects. At http://www.internet2.edu/ for instance, they have a thing called the National LambdaRail. This is a ten thousand mile long series of high-speed links that stretch around the continent of the US in a big ring with a couple of crossbars running north-south (squint your eyes and it looks like a giant belt buckle). Each link is made up of a pair of humongous fibre-optic cables that use Dense Wave Division Multiplexing to support 40 simultaneous wavelengths. Each wavelength can act as a separate network channel housing data through a pipe at a sweaty-palmed 10gbs. That's about 250 times faster than most Internet Service Providers can currently manage and 20,000 times faster than that ADSL link your so proud of.

Because they have 40 channels to play with, National LambdaRail is running several different network experiments over it simultaneously. Some are looking at technologies to increase the Internet Protocol Address space (like IPv6 (more on this later), some are looking at ways to improve the reliability of the internet packet delivery so that it can be used for time-sensitive applications (like media files) - so called Quality of Service or QoS.

One of the networks even treats the entire LambdaRail as a local area network. It actually uses ethernet protocols over a network 3,000 miles from end to end. Imagine a network where you can run word in New York but save your documents in L.A Or switch on a diskless workstation in Houston and boot it with an OS directly from Microsoft in Seattle.

At the moment LambdaRail is kept separate from the Internet. That's because global commerce is now so dependant on the Internet that scientists dare not muck about with it incase they cause a major outage. LambdaRail gives them a safe test bed where they can try out new technologies but which is also big enough to enable realistic experiments. The idea though, is that as the individual networks running over the LambdaRail become more stable, they can be used by the researchers as a tool, rather than a test subject itself. All the nodes on LambdaRail are US universities and there are plenty of high performance research projects out there that would love to be able to shift gigantic amounts of data around quickly. Remember that all of the networks on LambdaRail cover the same geographical territory (at least potentially some of them only have servers at a few of the available LambdaRail nodes). What distinguishes these networks is the protocol used to move the data.

The Conception

This is actually a critical point. It's easy to get fixated that on the wires and switches that make up the physical networks actually consist of seven conceptual layers piled on top of each other. Only the bottom layer is physical, the other six are implemented in software as a series of protocols. LambdaRail today resembles the ARPANET of the 1960's. As the research network evolved into the internet (then considered so special that it warranted a Capital I), It was the software that made it something that the rest of the world needed. Email, the web, instant messaging, FTP, RealAudio and Valve's Stream engine are all built on protocols running on protocols running on the actual wires.

Span and Speed

The physical scale and capacity of LambdaRail is undoubtedly an impressive bit of engineering, but by itself, all the fibre optic cable won't solve the problems of the internet. If every copper telephone wire and Cat5 ethernet cable was replaced with 40 wavelength fire, we still wouldn't have the Internet Mk II. In fact, communication speeds have been increasing in fits and starts since Alexander Graham Bell. The move to a fully fibre optic based Internet backbone is just the next step on that long road called progress. After All, there are only two performance metrics for communications hardware: Span and Speed. Once your network covers the globe, all which is left is to make it faster.

The real potential for innovation lies not with the network but what you use it for. In 1989, the Internet was just email, plus a dorky collection of text based systems called Bulletin Boards (Like Prestel and Micronet) and looked a bit like the old teletext service that you receive on your TV. Then Tim Burners Lee invented the World Wide Web and suddenly, even those without goatees could see the point of the Internet. The new came to dominate the net because it created a democratic, flexible and scalable way of sharing information. Before the web, it was relatively easy for individuals to access information held in large central repositories such as University Libraries, but very difficult for each user to make information of his or her own available to the rest of the world.

So, if LambdaRail is just the replacement wiring, what's the next web? Well, we'll tell you, its The Grid. This is a conceptual shift at the same time as radical and as subtle as the web was in its day. Just as the web, to most people, is the Internet, so The Grid will be and we will all refer to it simply as "the grid". For now, it's still new and demands our respect, so we must accord it Capital Letters.

The Grid

The Grid is a way of connecting computers together so that they don't just share data, they share processing power. It's a little bit like P2P, a little bit like cluster computing and also a little bit like those baffling business middleware technologies like COBRA and DCE. In reality though, The Grid is so much more than all of these can ever be.

Like the best ideas, it's simple enough. If you want electricity, you plug into a power point into an outlet; if you want computing power you will plug into The Grid. Remember the SETI@home program? The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence via Radio Signals. This combined tens of thousands of PC's from across the world to analyze portions of space looking for ET signals. Well The Grid is a bit like that. But compared with The Grid, the SETI project is like playing Counter Strike by email.

On the geek news site Slashdot The perennial joke whenever a faster computer arrives is "imagine a beowulf cluster of those". But beowulf clusters require identical computers using very low latency networks with all the machines in the same building. The Grid enables computers with different hardware architectures, specifications and running different Operating Systems to share resources, using network connections of different lengths and speeds and over much greater distances. Each Grid node can provide data storage or processing power or both. The load is distributed among nodes by a centralized server, but the results of the application can be shared by all nodes, or just one.

If all that sounds a bit woolly, imagine this: When you start a game (Half-Life 6 say lol) instead of running the graphics engine entirely on your own PC, The Grid enabled program spreads the workload evenly among everyone else with the game. Fast PC's thus help those with slower machines, PC's in quiet sections of the game help those rendering busy fire fights, and PC's left idle help everyone. Provided that there is some incentive scheme that factors the amount contributed to the rendering pool by each PC into, say a monthly subscription fee paid by each participant, the result is higher frame rates and more realistic graphics for everyone; all at a fraction of the cost of upgrading your own hardware when you need to.

So The Grid will change the way we live, and the way we do things on the internet and the scope for newer ways to get things done and for faster or immediate speeds will be a reality. The next internet will be 100% more stable and with the new IPv6 there will be enough IP numbers to go around for each person for every second of their life. And with 128bit encryption it will be more secure than anything we have now.

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