The Grid is a project that is examining ways in which the Internet will progress in the future, and today scientists have begun to shows us where their research is heading.
British scientists have finished a part of the future communications network which allows the widespread sharing of information among scientific communities, this information would involve huge amounts of data which would increase exponentially over time.
The Grid project is an international collaboration that is attempting to see how we need to change the Internet to cope with future demands, and the idea is that the network should be able to allow the sharing of computer power as well as the sharing of huge amounts of data. While this seems like an idea that will only benefit the scientific community at the moment it is expected that it will eventually become useful to end users of the future Internet, and the interest of private companies in the project has shown there is the potential of this technology being used like the Internet we know today is.
The announcement on Monday detailed the DAI (Data Access and Integration) programme, which shows specifications that will allow prototypes of the Grid system to be created. Tony Hay from the E-Secure Core Programme has told ZDNet: "When the data collected in a single year is now equivalent to the sum total of data collected beforehand, the scale of the challenge to share and harvest all that data becomes clear, .. The pioneering work of the UK team paves the way for this to happen and we expect to see a series of prototypes based on this research released in the coming weeks and months.".
News source: ZDNet
