CREN - State of the Art: Peer-to-Peer Networking

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Thursday, March 22, 2001, 4 pm EST

State of the Art: Peer-to-Peer Networking
with guest expert David P. Anderson of United Devices Inc., who is also Director of the SETI@home project at UC Berkeley.

The archived audio from this event is ready for your listening pleasure.

How do projects like Gnutella and Napster work? We know some of the problems with them, what are some of the positive potentials? Is peer-to-peer networking likely to some day be a mainstream tool? What are some projects using it for agreed-upon good? How is SETI@home related to projects like Gnutella and Napster?

Ask CREN's experts a question ahead of time by sending a message to expert@cren.net!

Guest Expert

David Anderson received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1985. From 1985 to 1991 he was on the faculty of the Computer Science department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests include operating systems, distributed computing, and computer music. Currently he is Chief Technology Officer of United Devices Inc., and is director of the Director of the SETI@home project at UC Berkeley. David is a contributor to the recent book, Peer-to-Peer Networking: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. He is an avid classical pianist and rock climber.

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Co-Hosts

Howard Strauss (above, left), Manager of Academic Applications at Princeton University, is TechTalk's Technology Anchor.

Judith Boettcher is the Executive Director of CREN.

Together, Howard and Mark will ask the really tough questions—and relay the questions you email to them at expert@cren.net.

Background & Resources

Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies is a recent book on this topic to which our guest expert contributed.

One of the very best ways to get background on an issue is by reviewing the audio, transcript, and resource list from any related Tech Talks which have been previously broadcast and are now fully archived. Not right on target, but related, is a talk last year with Kevin Morooney on Research Computing and Linux Clusters. Sharing information online leads to intellectual propoerty issues, of course, and much of our interview of Laura Gasaway on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is pertinent to those issues.

SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Anyone can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. It's a great example of how the power of distributed computing can be used to solve problems that would otherwise not even be approached due to massive computing needs.

United Devices and the National Foundation for Cancer Research (NFCR) Centre for Drug Discovery in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, England, are teaming up in the search for new cancer drugs using this technology. It is anticipated that about 24 million hours of computer time will be required to accomplish this task � considered to be the largest computational chemistry project ever undertaken. It's yet another example of the power of this kind of computing.

Next month, EDUCAUSE's Networking 2001 conference will address a lot of related issues. For example, the panel session at 10:30 am on Wednesday, April 11, is entitled The Future of Peer-to-Peer Applications.

For both theoretical and practical ideas, see the P2P Idea Page - a rich online resource. To bring yourself up to speed on some basic terminology, browse P2P / Peer-to-Peer Networking Terminology by Ben Houston, Albert Vierling, Chuck Wegrzyn, and Lucas Gonze, a portion of the P2P Idea Page website.

Oreilly's P2P Development Center provides useful resources for commercial developers of peer-to-peer networking applications.

The Peer-to-Peer Working Group is a consortium for the advancement of infrastructure standards for peer-to-peer computing.

For a comprehensive look at the business end of P2P, see Ecompany Now's P2P Web File.

Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet is a great collection of opinions and knowledge from one expert about P2P and other interesting topics.

Finally, as part of a series of reports on P2P, Wired provided a lot of online resources last Fall, including:

Wired's Guide to Global File-Sharing
The Future is Now by Jerome Kuptz
The Next Economy of Ideas, by John Perry Barlow, co-founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation. This article is a must-read for its breath-taking scope! It starts out: "Long awaited by some and a nasty surprise to others, the conflict between the industrial age and the virtual age is now being fought in earnest, thanks to that modestly conceived but paradigm-shattering thing called Napster."

We're still gathering recent and pertinent hyperlinks for you right now! Got a resource to add to our list? Send suggestions to Event Page Producer Terry Calhoun at tcalhoun@scup.org. We welcome your contribution to our resource listings. Please share a useful URL and/or your description of the resource to be found there.

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