What is the most mystical thing that you know? I guess you know the answer from the title of this article, it is the internet. Hardly anyone knows exactly how it works, or if there is ultimately someone who is in charge of the of the workings of the thing. If I said to you, "who runs the internet", I bet that you would not be able to answer. It is an amazing thing, really amazing. When we look at it from the point of view of a person on a personal computer that connects to the internet, that is only a very small view of the monster that is out there. In 2002 the internet was thought to be over 500,000 terabytes in size. A terabyte is a unit of storage that is 1,000 gigabytes. A gigabyte is another unit of storage that is 1 billion bytes of data. Today the internet is estimated to be far larger than it was in 2002. In 2002 there were an estimated 605 million internet users. It is estimated that the size increases about 18% each year. In 2005 we passed 1 billion users. 36% of all internet users are in Asia, 24% are in Europe, with 23% in North America. The U.S. is no longer the dominant internet user. By the time we hit 2015, less than 15% of all internet users will be Americans. That is still about 3X our numbers in the world population.

How does the internet cope with all this phenomenal growth? Who is increasing the amount of machines out there to handle this added traffic and adding new lines and such? That is the question that many wonder about, who owns the internet? Quick answer, no one. There are many lines going into the internet. These lines are from telephone companies, cable companies and others. There is something called the internet backbone. That is the structure behind the internet that everything connects to. Several large companies run the backbone that allows the internet to operate. An example of one of these companies is AOL. There is a private organization that is located in Reston, Virginia that is composed of over 150 member countries and these people try to address internet issues to keep the monster functioning. There are over 7,000 individual members and 100 member organizations in the group. The big players on the internet will have to eventually become India and China, just on the basis of population alone. If everyone in these 2 countries would log onto the internet that would account for about 2.5 billion people or about 1/3 of the entire world.

What type of machines run the internet? Well you guessed it, computers of course. The lucky thing is that they just keep getting more powerful. There is something called Moore's Law that states that computer power doubles about every two years and it seems to be going even faster lately. We are talking about speed, memory capacity and digital camera resolution. It is a lucky thing for us, because if this wasn't true, then we might not have been able to keep up with the zippy growth of the internet. As a matter of fact, we probably have far less machines involved with the backbone of the internet than we did years ago. Think about this, the internet use increases by about 18% a year. That is 36% every 2 years, while computer capacity is doubling in the same time period. That means it is increasing 100% in the same time. Because of this increase the computers are winning the race by such large margins that they are gaining the capacity to handle about 3 times the increase in the same time, making it possible to use less and less machines, while the population on the internet grows. Keep this in mind while I tell you about the next event.

IBM has made a revolutionary proposal. Maybe if this was coming from a different company we wouldn't be paying as much attention to it and we would just write it off, but IBM can not be ignored. They were the ones that had most of the main frame computers in years past. Here is their proposal. They have a new supercomputer called Blue Gene. The architecture of this machine accounts for 4 of the top 10 fastest computers in the world. IBM claims that they can upscale this one computer and use it to run THE ENTIRE INTERNET. Can you believe that, one computer running everything? It sound impossible, but when you look at their plan, you begin to see that they will probably be able to do it. They state that they will have to install 67.1 million cores, better know as *cpus or central processing units. While this might be doable, it seems to me that it would not be desirable. Why, you might ask, do I feel that way? I can't help but think that it is never a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket. It seems to me that this one machine would be much easier to knock out than multiple ones, if some one or group desired to do so. I remember the black out that happened in the 1960s on the east coast, it happened because everything on the grid depended on one switch and that was knocked out by a malfunction. Do we want to see the entire internet go down because one computer is running it? There are also other problems. The internet would be run on Lixux, which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the chips in Blue Gene would be Power PC chips, not the usual X86 type, so different code would be required. All this bucks the current system and you have to wonder what effect this would have on the internet operation. Another difference is the machine would employ SMP (symmetric multi-processing) instead of the current method of clustering, where you keep adding more servers. An advantage of the system is that is it is able to use much of the off the shelf hardware that is available now.

One thing just keeps popping into my mind. I guess that I have been getting into conspiracy theories too much lately, but it seems to me that the entire internet could be hijacked by a rogue government using one of these power house computers and how would we ever know it? We would all be giving up all our bank account and credit card numbers to legitimate sources, but these numbers could also be registering in the main, gigantic computer off in some distant foreign country. They would have merely blocked the Blue Gene computer and put theirs on the same portal after they stole all the connections. Of course in reality this would be such a huge undertaking, that I really don't know if it could ever be accomplished, but just knowing that it is a possibility is scary. One thing in the favor of the IBM system is that it can add almost instant band width to a site. Band width allows more people to get onto a site at once. It is sort of like enlarging a room in your house. You might have had a room where 8 people could have sat comfortably and you enlarged it and now 12 can be seated.

When you and I go online, we only see the outer layer of the internet. That is the place where websites reside. It is like the tip of the iceberg. None of the supporting structure is visible to the naked eye. Those of us that use FTP, which is short for File Transfer Protocol, are able to go a little deeper, but only slightly. We can go to the point where web pages and files are loaded on to the website so others can see them or download them. FTP can also be used to download. Beyond this is the website host. The place were all the websites sit on servers waiting for others to view them. I could take you deeper, but things just become too technological, but I think that you get the idea. The bottom layer would be where signals or electrical impulse or even light signals, if applicable, would flow as bit streams. That is where things go through the last set of cables into the backbone machines that make of the very lowest point of the internet.

So you can see the internet is a monster, yet our ability to easily control it is increasing at a break neck pace. Maybe someday, everyone's home computer will be so powerful that any of them will be able to accomplish this task? I know that is hard to imagine now, but when computers used to fill several large rooms, no one would have believed that far more powerful ones would exist that were so small that they would sit on a desktop and that most people would have one.

*This is what is at the heart of your home computer, they are currently available as a single core, dual core or quad core. Dual and Quad core cpus are central processing chips that have 2 or 4 processing units built into one chip.