The Scientific Internet

ManicDeity writes "'Forget the Matrix. It's time for the Grid-' From the good people at CERN who brought us the WWW comes a new network designed for scientific use named GriPhyN (Grid Physics Network). Loosely described 'as a Napster for scientist' it is being developed to handle the massive amounts of information created from the highest energy experiment to date. The article can be found at Space.com. " It was my understanding that this was part of what I2 was supposed to do - but this looks cool as well.

Comments

The Grid?

[the_tsi]

It's been around for years. Pete Townshend designed it in 1970-1971.

We won't get fooled again.

-Chris

Re:What happened to Internet2?

[habib23]

Internet 2 is alive and well (and having a conference in Atlanta at the end of October). But they are an organisation really part of UCAID. The physical network used as the national research and education backbone is now called Abilene, and was built by Qwest. This replaces vBNS which was built by MCI/Worldcom under the orginal 1995 grant (expired in 2000) and has since been sold off too the highest bidder. As I said this is alive and well, and peers with the European (10-155) and Asian (APAN) as well as Canadian (CA*Net3) equivalents. There is a world wide interconnected series of research networks (where do you think the grid traffic is running over, the commodity internet). I just got back from NorduNet 2000 in Helsinki (I live in the states) and the EU is already working on upgrading 10-155 and all the sub networks it encompasses. More info at http://www.internet2.edu and

http://www.ucaid.edu/abilene/

For more info about the GriPhyN check here

[Vuarnet]

You can read the project summary for the Grid Physics Network.

Here's what they're proposing to use the GriPhyN for: The four physics experiments are about to enter a new era of exploration of the fundamental forces of nature and the structure of the universe. The CMS and ATLAS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider will search for the origins of mass and probe matter at the smallest length scales; LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) will detect the gravitational waves of pulsars, supernovae and in-spiraling binary stars; and SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) will carry out an automated sky survey enabling systematic studies of stars, galaxies, nebulae, and large-scale structure.

This seems less like Napster...

[64.28.67.48]

And more like SETI@Home -- using the net to do distributed computing, but the article seems to indicate that storage will be distributed as well. And I think that all the computers that are part of the network will be dedicated to this task; you won't be able to hook up your home machine to GriPhyN. If you're going to spread out your storage, you will need to be able to rely on it being there (i.e., Joe Homeuser shut off his PC and now we can't get access to the secrets of the atom),

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"Napster for scientists"

[OlympicSponsor]

What an interesting phrase. Note how scientists are encouraged/enabled to share ideas/data/information. Note how the hoi polloi are not. What's the diff? Not money--we all know how much money a good scientific discovery can make.

The difference is that when scientists starting publicizing their ideas for the purposes of testing and priority, they also unwittingly tapped into the REAL benefit (to society): knowledge is power. Sure, you can make money off of things that you know that I don't. But that's chump change compared to what we can do if we share what we know. Non-scientific fields have yet to figure this out.

The first society to allow (mandate?) free sharing of ideas to everyone (while still giving scientific-priority-style credit to the originator) is going to look back at us and laugh: "They thought they could advance by keeping secrets! What fools!"
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