By SCOTT DEWING
Published: June 2008

Riding on the coat-tails of April Fool's Day came this headline in The Sunday Times: "Coming Soon: Superfast Internet". The lead was enticing: "The Internet could soon be made obsolete. The scientists who pioneered it have now built a lightning-fast replacement capable of downloading entire feature films within seconds." At first, I wondered if this was a belated April Fool's Day joke. The Internet obsolete? Download entire movies in mere seconds? It was too good to be true. And like most things too good to be true, this wasn't either.

At the center of all this noise about a better and faster Internet is CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is known primarily for a couple of things: smashing atoms in gigantic particle accelerators and the invention of the World Wide Web. The article in The Times was, in part, the result of a collision between CERN's legacy of inventing the Web and its primary mission of smashing stuff we can't see so that scientists can gain insight into the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

Of course, CERN didn't invent the Internet anymore than Al Gore did. The Internet was invented by some computer scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). A lot of very smart people have contributed to the creation and growth of the Internet, but if you're looking for someone to call the "Godfather of the Internet", your best bet would be J.C.R. Licklider, who was appointed to run DARPA in 1962. A visionary of the potential of computers, Licklider authored a paper in 1960 entitled "Man-Computer Symbiosis" in which he proposed a future that sounded like something out of science fiction.

"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly," Licklider wrote, "and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought..." In that same paper, Licklider also proposed the idea of a global network of computers. "It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval...The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services."

Licklider's vision of a network of interconnected computers grew over the next couple of decades to become what we now refer to as "The Internet". The Internet grew rapidly as universities, government agencies and research centers became interconnected. CERN didn't hook up to the Internet until 1989. But when they did, they quickly introduced a new concept that would rapidly transform how the Internet was used and lay the foundation for its exponential expansion. That new concept was the World Wide Web, invented by a CERN computer scientist named Timothy Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web was a new way to share information over the otherwise clunky Internet. It had two parts: a Web server and a Web client. A Web client, commonly referred to as a "browser", connects to the Web server and "requests" a particular Web "page". (A collection of Web "pages" is called a Web "site".) That page is transmitted back to the Web client. A lot of other technical stuff happens during that process, but that's the basics of Berners-Lee's invention. The first Web server went online at CERN on Christmas Day 1990. Today, there are millions of Web servers connected to the Internet, serving up billions of pages of content.

The problem with the World Wide Web, however, was speed. If either the Web server or the Web client (or both) had a slow connection to the Internet, it could take a long time for a Web page to load. Those of us who were around during the early days of the Web (a.k.a., the World Wide Wait) remember going to get a cup of coffee or mow the lawn while we waited for a Web site to load. While the speed has improved, especially with higher speed connections becoming available to home users at semi-reasonable prices, it remains an issue. This is because an increase in speed is inevitably met by an increase in data demand. Web sites have grown from simple text to graphics to streaming video.

The post-April Fool's Day article in The Times claimed that CERN was going to solve this problem for us by providing a "superfast" Internet. At the center of this empty promise is the CERN Grid, a collection of 55,000 servers interconnected with high-speed, fiber-optic data lines. All of these computers work together as one massively parallel computer that can crunch a lot of data in a short amount of time. The CERN Grid will be used primarily to crunch all the data generated by CERN's new Large Hadron Collider, which will go online this summer.

Now, like me, you're probably wondering how all this will result in a "superfast" Internet experience for us lowly end-users with our single processor computers, low speed data lines, and crude ability to only smash large objects. The simple answer: it won't. Well, at least not immediately. While the CERN Grid will not make the Internet "obsolete" as The Times article mistakenly claimed, it will be a landmark step toward realizing the next iteration of the Internet: powerful computers working in-parallel to form a "thinking center" that will first be utilized by scientists then by everyday people like you and me. How will this impact the world? Increased data processing and delivery speed will be one impact, but I imagine that there will be others. Perhaps the technical director of the CERN Grid, Tony Doyle, summed it up best. "The history of the Internet shows that you cannot predict its real impacts," he said, "but we know they will be huge."