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November 20, 2000

New Life For Peer-To-Peer Computing

Napster brought the concept to consumers, now the idea is taking off in the business world

By Andy Patrizio

By Claudia Newell

More on peer-to-peer:

sidebar:Mithral Project Looks Beyond Project-Splitting

EETimes: Intel issues peer-to-peer networking call (11/13/00)

Internet Week: Load Testing Uses Distributed PCs (11/13/00)

EETimes: Two distributed computing advances hit Net (11/13/00)

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apster Inc. is still reeling from legal challenges, but the company gave life and validation to the concept of peer-to-peer computing, and surprisingly, the idea has caught fire in business environments, rather than the consumer realm where Napster found its home.

Peer-to-peer computing is hardly new. Some old hands argue that it's exactly what the Internet is and always has been about. Many of the Internet's elements are peer to peer, such as file transfer and Telnet for remote logon. "Peer to peer always existed, we just called it the Internet," says Duncan Beberg, chief technology officer for Mithral Communications & Design Inc., the developer of a software developers' kit for building peer-to-peer and distributed applications. In a business environment, the situation is different. Client-server architecture is everything because it allows IT managers a measure of control. "IT managers are very much proponents of centralized control," says David Multer, VP of engineering and chief technology officer for consulting firm FusionOne. "They understand the flow of content. Peer-to-peer is a direct connection between people, so IT isn't necessarily involved."

There are predecessors to peer-to-peer computing, but they're dedicated to simple functions such as instant messaging, including America Online's Instant Messenger and ICQ and Microsoft's MSN Messenger Service. Another example is whiteboarding, such as Microsoft's NetMeeting, which lets two people communicate and work together in an application such as Microsoft Word.

The enormous success of Napster and SETI@Home, part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project, which has hundreds of idle computers crunching away on radio signals pulled down from outer space in an attempt to find messages from another world, has major companies realizing that their most powerful asset may be all of the individual desktops that get shut off at night. Napster and SETI@Home also represent two types of peer-to-peer computing: file sharing and CPU resource sharing.

At least two industry groups have sprung up. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Intel formed the Peer-to-Peer Working Group, a consortium to promote the benefits of peer-to-peer computing for business.

The group has three veterans of distributed computing efforts as members--Entropia, Distributed Sciences, and Popular Power. All three run commercial projects similar to SETI@ Home. Entropia runs FightAIDS@ Home, which tests AIDS drugs; Distributed Sciences has a project to find the most efficient means of storage for nuclear waste; and Popular Power runs a program simulating the effectiveness of influenza drugs.

Duncan Beberg Gary Parker The other project is the New Productivity Initiative, consisting of 11 hardware and software companies, including Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Silicon Graphics. The group is designed to create a layered set of open APIs for distributed resource management for creating applications similar to SETI@Home.

Beberg isn't sure peer to peer can take off as a business. "None of this is really new. What's new is the hype because of Napster," he says. "But there's no business model. In peer to peer, there's no middleman. Because there's no middleman, no one can charge. There's no money to be made on peer-to-peer, just like there's no money in TCP/IP. It's just there; you use it as a tool to build other things."

The biggest name in distributed computing is Groove Networks Inc. of Beverly, Mass. It garnered a lot of attention because its founder and CEO is Ray Ozzie, who created Lotus Notes while working at Lotus Development Corp., now an IBM subsidiary. Groove offers a platform for building peer-to-peer applications and hides much of the complexity of dealing with firewalls, encryption, and other security issues that are a major issue for IT managers.

Photo by Raimund Koch Communication is handled by the Groove Transceiver, which runs on each user's computer. This handles all of the communication and is what developers target when creating peer-to-peer applications. "We do the hard work of communication and security so the developer doesn't have to," says Jack Ozzie, VP of framework and developer services at Groove, and brother of Ray Ozzie. "We try to make the platform rich enough so the application developer worries about the problem he has to solve, not about how to make a connection."

To communicate with another person, the user sends an invitation via E-mail. If the recipient doesn't have Transceiver, a link in the E-mail lets the person download the basic edition for free. (The Transceiver Premium player is priced at $50 to $100.) Transceiver is also intelligent and detects the connection. When modem users aren't using Groove, the Transceiver sets itself into a low priority to free up bandwidth. Likewise, Transceiver can detect if the connection is internal or external.

If two users inside a firewall attempt to connect, the connection is made directly, but if a user is attempting to connect to another person through a firewall, the connection is facilitated by Groove in a secure domain. The connection and the domain, a shared space for all of the participants, are encrypted with a 192-bit RC4 key from RSA Security Inc.

The platform works through firewalls by routing all traffic through port 80, the HTTP port used by Web browsers. Connections are fully encrypted, as is the shared space, which takes place on a router at Groove's data center.

One of Groove's early adopters likes its open architecture. "Rather than build a proprietary space such as Notes, Groove lets you take Component Object Model components that were written for a different purpose and, with a little script coding, take advantage of all of Groove's capabilities," says John Wollman, senior VP of solutions for Alliance Consulting, a developer of E-business and managed services in Philadelphia.

John Wollman Bill Cramer Because it uses simple scripting such as Visual Basic Script or JavaScript, already existing objects can be integrated into the Groove platform, and that means reuse of existing objects as well as integrating the system into back-end COM systems.

"By providing one consistent platform for building applications, Groove can provide a consistent experience across a wide arrange of applications," Multer says. FusionOne is working with Groove to help expand the Groove toolkit so it supports a wide variety of applications, languages, and object models. "NetMeeting is powerful, but nowhere near as extensible as Groove. It's a specific, Microsoft-oriented tool. But Groove is trying to leverage the Web model to support any client."

Alliance Consulting hadn't built any peer-to-peer systems before the release of Groove because there was nothing available that was robust enough, Wollman says. "If there was a way to do it, we didn't know of it," he says.