A super-high-bandwidth network is being switched on in August that will pump out 15 petabytes per second or 15 million GB.  The extreme speed will push data to some 5000 scientists in 500 institutions across the world to help speed access to the vast amounts of research data being collected all the time.

Preparations are being made for the world’s largest particle accelerator, the “Large Hadron Collider”, which is being switched on in August at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The Large “Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG)” is the high-bandwidth network pumping 15 petabytes that will be used to access the Large Hadron Collider, according to CNet. 

The science behind all this is pretty interesting, though hard to understand at times.  Basically, the particle accelerator will smash subatomic particles and protons into each other at 99% the speed of light, spraying huge amounts of energy and particles into its detectors.  What this means is that researchers can tap into the distributed processing power of almost 100,000 CPUs, crunching through vast amounts of data from the detectors and speeding their hunt for clues about the fundamental nature of the universe.

Labs that are currently pulling data from the collider are accessing at around 10 GBPS which is already 1000 times faster than most home-based broadband connections.  Andrew Sansum, of Rutherford Appleton Laboratories, near Oxford stated; “It may be less than two decades before commercial networks catch up: video and other media services are going to push the speed of consumer network connections up as the demand is going to be huge,” Sansum said. “We were at today’s speed of about 10Mbps about 10 to 15 years ago, so you could take that as a precedent for how long it will take for the commercial networks to catch up with us today.”

Does that mean home connections in the next 10 to 15 years will approach 15,000 GBPS?  I sure hope so, though unlikely.  I don’t see a need for this extremely large amount of data for a long long time to come.  Maybe for higher-priority business or government applications, but not for us regular folk.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 3:14 pm under Internet, Science and technology.

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