News — CHICAGO, Illinois—April 1, 2024—The Globus Transfer service has long been the preferred tool for moving data rapidly, reliably, and securely over high-speed networks. However, Globus, like other transfer tools, has until now been restricted to transmitting data only after a user decided to move it. Today we announce work by the Globus team that overcomes that limitation so that data transfers can start—and in some cases even complete—before a user makes a transfer request. This new capability is made possible by the use of specially doped fibers that exploit the curious endochronic properties of thiotimoline to propagate (in ways still not well understood by scientists) a user’s intent to move data before that intent is expressed in the form of a transfer command.
Globus scientists have worked for over a year to incorporate this new capability into the Globus service. By careful optimization of network parameters and making extensive use of parallelism in network adapters, they were eventually able to extend endochronic communication, or pre- transmission, to up to two minutes over an ultra-modern science network—a quantity demonstrated, in fact, in the transmittal of this press release, which was issued at 12:01am on April 1, 2024, but hit the wires at 11:59pm on March 31. Extensive experiments have proved that endochronic pre-transmission occurs consistently before a user actually issues the transfer command—but never without a transfer command later occurring. “No matter how hard we try, we cannot fool the arrow of time,” observed Globus director R. Ananthakrishnan.
The science that underpins this new capability dates back to the 1948 discovery of thiotimoline[1], a molecule in which certain carbon-carbon bonds are so squeezed as to extend into the fourth dimension: a phenomenon known as endochronicity. This is the first practical application of endochronicity to data transfer. Globus endochronic transmission is currently most useful for smaller transfers for which pre-transmission time dominates transmission time. However, work in progress suggests that by splitting large data into smaller subsets, and using an intent delegation protocol, the method can be extended to arbitrarily large datasets. The implications for other scientific problems, not least that of late proposal submissions, will be investigated in future work.
The Globus team is also investigating novel interfaces that will allow users to leverage this new capability more intuitively, including embedded devices such as Neuralink’s implantable brain-computer interface (BCI), Telepathy, which can capture the user’s thought process and rapidly translate it to actionable events. “We are truly excited at the future prospect of such a BCI mesh, or time-disconnected neural network, that can deliver advanced research data management capabilities to millions of researchers without any of them lifting a finger”, mused Globus Labs lead K. Chard.
[1] I. Asimov, JASF, 1948, pp120-125 [].
About Globus
Globus is a data management and compute platform used by leading non-profit and commercial research organizations, national laboratories, and government facilities worldwide. Operated by the University of Chicago, the Globus data management service enables secure, reliable file transfer, sharing, remote computation and automation throughout the research lifecycle. The Globus platform supports access to diverse storage and computing resources, from lab servers and campus clusters to cloud and supercomputing environments. Globus connects more than 50,000 organizations in over 80 countries.
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