"Peer to peer" is the "buzz phrase" for a family of distributed systems which are currently being widely being implemented using ad hoc technology. "Peer to peer" implementation of distributed file systems, distributed content management and distributed large-scale parallel computation are popping up all over the place. There are numerous companies claiming to implement peer to peer solutions for various problems. There is a working group on peer to peer computing (http://www.peer-to-peerwg.org/) and numerous web sites focusing on peer to peer technologies, for example, http://cnscenter.future.co.kr/hot-topic/p2p.html.
The essential characteristic of true peer to peer network architectures is that the interactions are formulated as occurring among peers rather than as client/server interactions. Interactions are symmetric and "system" control is fully distributed.
The peer to peer study group in CS at UT-Austin will read and analyze papers defining and describing peer to peer systems, papers defining and describing algorithms for symmetric and distributed management and control of distributed systems and papers defining protocols in which to formulate interactions among peers in a peer to peer network architecture. We will also install and do experimental work with both freeware and commercial implementations of peer to peer systems and protocol families for implementation of peer to peer systems.
The group will meet roughly every other week during October and November, once each week in December and January and twice each week in February, March and April.
The first and organizing meeting will be at 2:30PM Tuesday October 9 in ACES 3.408. A local web page for the CS Department Study Group on Peer to Peer Network Architectures has been set up at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/p2p. If you are interested in participating in the Peer to Peer Study Group, please send sign up at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/p2p/signup.html. If you have particular papers/topics you would like to discuss or other useful links, add them to the on-line bibliography at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dahlin/p2p/showPapers.cgi.
At the first meeting, we will discuss Freenet. A schedule of discussions will appear here.
We are in the process of building a list of related papers (and sites) (we will pick a subset to discuss as a group). If there are papers you want to read/discuss in the group, please add them here.