ABSTRACT
In this century, the Spaceship Earth dream is being facilitated by telecomputation tools originally devised to fl y aeroplanes, rockets and satellites. Pulsing the scenes fl ickering across our myriad screens are the semiconductor and sensor-enabled infrastructures of “massive parallelism” 3 connecting non-visual data across globally distributed grids of processors, portals and storage banks. As predicted by Al Gore in his 1992 proposal for a “Digital Earth” global climate model, parallelism seems to be the only systems architecture, and conceptual metaphor, that could “cope with the enormous volume of data that will be routinely beamed down from orbit”.
