Progress bars could be a thing of the past if ‘Globus’ (the network middleware infrastructure designed to handle the massive amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider) has any influence on the future of the Internet.

The instrumentation will be producing one gigabyte per second of information, which then has to be transferred instantly from its location in Switzerland to universities around the globe.

The capacity of this network is easily enough to make the largest ISP wobble, so the engineers and scientists are using a mixture of Teir 1 and Teir 2 fibre optic cable to handle the throughput.

This is not revolutionary in itself, but the way the data is handled using the middleware (globus), primarily its architecture and design means that huge amounts (gigabytes) of information will be delivered instantly with literally no delay. This could mean a revolution in the way that data is handled over the Internet and lead to a much richer convergence of mediums, visual media being the first obvious candidate.

If it takes a small black hole to get rid of the progress bar, then hey - it’ll be worth it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 6th, 2008 at 11:13 am and is filed under thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.