TORONTO – Internet traffic could grow eight times more than forecast
over the next decade because of commercial adoption of Grid computing
and related P2P applications, economist Robert Cohen said yesterday at
Global Grid Forum 4.
Cohen, of New York-based Cohen Communications Group, focuses on the Internet and
telecom industries. He said Internet traffic will begin to double again
next year and accelerate to annual rates of 150% or more from 2005-2008,
with Grid computing the main driver of bandwidth use.
Current forecasts, such as McKinsey-JP Morgan, assume that annual growth
will slow to about 60% by 2005, with traffic growth driven largely by
video streaming and video file transfers, Cohen said.
But peered servers will begin to drive Internet traffic growth in the
U.S. in the next 12-18 months, Cohen said, spurred in part by huge
projected declines in the price of backbone bandwidth.
Cohen said his methodology was based on “a Delphi-like series of
interviews with network engineers and experts” to determine current and
future traffic flows; explicit adjustments for price changes using a
measure of demand elasticity for bandwidth; and measures of capacity at
three points in time for most Internet routes. He adjusted the numbers
for the current economic downturn.
Driving that projected bandwidth growth will be Grid computing, which
aggregates compute resources and cycles for powerful applications.
Already widely used in life sciences, Cohen expects greater use of Grid
and collaborative technologies in financial, R&D, and general
decision-making drawing on a wide range of data resources. Software for
collaboration will bring more data resources into use, boosting
server-to-server traffic. Consumers could also turn to collaborative
capabilities, shifting spending to the Internet to pay for higher levels
of services.
Grid computing enables communities, or “virtual organizations,” to share
resources as they pursue common goals, and new applications will enable
the coordinated use of geographically distributed resources, Cohen said.
As data access becomes more important to businesses, resources will
shift to support that focus, he said. With rapid growth of Grid
computing, P2P and server-to-server (S2S) traffic could account for
nearly 90% of Internet traffic by 2008, he said.
Cohen said that if collaboration supports the growth of relatively
low-cost broadband, services might be delivered at much lower cost via
end-to-end networks, shifting labor to machines and substantially
boosting productivity. Collaborative technologies could change how
businesses and individuals pay for the Internet, with data services
pricing done on a value-added basis instead of ISPs competing on a price
basis for data transport, he said.
Globus, Platform, Avaki Announce New Initiatives
Cohen’s predictions for the growth of Grid computing are supported by
attendance at Global Grid Forum events, which is expected to double from
last year to 500-700 attendees at this year’s events. About 500 people
attended the Toronto meeting, which ends tomorrow.
Among the announcements at the meeting, Platform Computing announced the
availability of Platform Globus, the first commercially supported
version of the widely adopted Globus Toolkit, and Avaki proposed a Secure
Grid Naming Protocol. The Open Grid Services Architecture, the Globus-IBM vision for the
convergence of Grid computing and Web services, was well received, which
will likely lead to the formation of a formal working group on Grid
services. And IBM is expected to make a significant Grid announcement tomorrow.
