A few days ago we were reading this post on how could the Large Hadron Collider change the Internet. In short, the author’s point was this. In 1990 CERN created the World Wide Web as a response to the scientists’ needs to exchange information. WWW has changed the face of the Internet.

Now, with the LHC, scientists’ needs have changed. New problems arise. The answer to these new problems might, as the WWW did, revolutionize the Internet one more time.

It wasn’t quite clear from that post (for us, at least) what could have been the new WWW. And then we thought “Oh, it’s The Grid!” 🙂

In a few words, it seems that with the LHC (but not only, there are other projects, too) scientists need not only a way to store and exchange large quantities of information, but also greater processing power. And this is, supposedly, what the Grid adds to the WWW.

When you are connected to the Internet, you can navigate on the WWW to access and share information. In the future, it seems, you would be able to use a Grid to share computing power as well (remember SETI@home, right?) and profit from the computing power shared by other people.

So, the question is: Will this Grid change the Internet and our computing experience, the way the World Wide Web did? Gramo says no.

Why is that? Well, you have to be a scientist to understand what need a long and complicated computation would satisfy (mind you, we don’t talk 3d games here). And that is what the Grid mainly provides – computation power. Regular people already have more than enough processing power on their home computers. And now, with the mini-notebooks and the mini-PCs, we see a trend forming to limit that processing power.

Information exchange was something regular people wanted as much as the scientists. The World Wide Web answered that need. The Grid, on the other hand, would be a great achievment, but only for scientists.