Peer-to-Peer, an Overview
Peer-to-peer is a class of applications that takes advantage of resources -
storage, cycles, content, human presence - available at the edges of the
Internet. Because accessing these decentralized resources means operating
in an environment of unstable connectivity and unpredictable IP addresses,
peer-to-peer nodes must operate outside the DNS and have significant or total
autonomy from central servers.
Clay Shirky - The
Accelerator Group.
During the year 2000 an
application, freely available to the public, hit the Internet by storm. It
appeared with the right qualities at the right time, and shook the commercial
music and software world. Napster
enabled users connected at the edges of the internet to act as a resource for
others by making their music files available in a searchable digital music
library. Prior to this, connected users played a largely passive role, in
commercial distributed systems, downloading and accessing content from servers
located around the Internet. The original ARPANET, developed during the 1960's
was, ironically, a peer-to-peer network. Although influences from
application software (such as FTP) and an influx of users with slow connections
and low-powered local hardware caused a gradual shirt in towards a
client-server based environment and this trend was accentuated by the advent of
the World Wide Web (WWW). Today the nodes residing at the edge of the Internet
have a collective computing potential that dwarfs anything else on the planet.
Peer-to-peer computing provides the opportunity to tap into this potential.
There are many
computational problems that can be aided by the correct application of P2P
technology, for example SETI@home
uses the spare CPU cycles of peers around the edge of the Internet to analyse
vast amounts of radio telescope data for evidence of extraterrestrial life,
while BOINC extends
this idea to support any kind of distributed processing on PCs around the edge
of the network. P2P computing may also aid us is in the searching and indexing
of web content, thus relieving the work put on web spiders. Finally, P2P
technology can help support communication and collaboration between users. The
proliferation of Instant Messenger applications such as ICQ, MSN Messenger
and Skype illustrates this
fact.
Objectives of this website
This website aims to act as
a resource for the P2P paradigm.
It contains general
information regarding P2P and also aims to promote the various P2P technologies
that have been, and are still being, developed by its contributors.
Recent Updates
27/01/06
- Updated P2P Documents and P2P Application Framework pages.
20/09/05 – P2P Web links updated.
06/09/04 - JTella page added.