The Bubbling Load Monitor (or "Bubblemon" for short) is a system load monitor for the GNOME panel. It looks like a vial containing water. The water level indicates how much (electronic) memory is in use. The color of the liquid indicates how much swap space is used. The amount of bubbles reflects the system CPU load. A message in a bottle indicates there is unread mail. A reed-like graph shows IO load.
On SMP systems CPU load distribution is visualized by having the most heavily loaded CPUs bubbles in the middle and the others nearer to the edges.