The Transitive project was conceived and developed as a means to visualize point-to-point file transfers like those most commonly exchanged on the Internet, but on a high-bandwidth link. It looks forward to when commodity Internet bandwidth is no longer the bottleneck, and multimedia files; however bandwidth intensive, will flow effortlessly between the millions of endpoints that are computers.

Transitive visualizes multiple file transfers running concurrently over a 10 / 100 Mbps local area network (LAN). Each transfer “identifiable by color, size and sound” is rendered in 3D and displayed on a projector-based passive-stereo system. A LAN’s larger bandwidth is capable of supporting multimedia files and other bandwidth-intensive applications. On a LAN with minimal latency, one can instantly see the correlation between the data, graphics and sound.

Transitive visualizes the total capacity available on a defined network by measuring the bandwidth and instantaneous received data between the compute nodes. All of the nodes are running as part of a demonstration. In effect, Transitive is a visualization system of bandwidth between distributed system components.