He's one of the world's foremost experts on grid computing, sharing resources among thousands of PC users. I made contact this week with Ian Foster, a Kiwi and professor of computer science in Chicago. The pipes are there, but the telcos charge for each megabyte sent or received. This country does not have an advanced network that will allow scientific communities to share these tremendous data at the price researchers can afford. New Zealand scientists, unfortunately, need not apply. Cheap processing power and international telecommunications traffic capacity have come together to provide scientists with the tools they need to unlock the secrets of the universe. Today's scientists are able to make tremendous leaps of understanding, far more than their predecessors, for one simple reason: they can share knowledge on a level undreamed of in years gone by. Instead you will have to wait for several months for a stack of CDs to be sent out or perhaps you will just abandon that area of research. You can't download the latest version of the genome because it would take all day, tying up both the computer resources and network capacity - not to mention your entire budget in bandwidth costs. You might be studying the works of Chaucer or high energy physics or something to do with the human genome or biotechnology. Imagine for a moment you're a researcher at a university in New Zealand.
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