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December 4, 2000

Peer-To-Peer Potpourri: Something For Everyone

Consumers, IT managers, and software developers can all revel in the joys of peer-to-peer computing this holiday season because there's a little slice of technology pie for everyone. It's not "revolutionary" or a "paradigm shift," as I see mentioned in the mainstream press, but merely some new ways of doing old things. Whether you call it "Peer-to-Peer," "Peer Computing," "P2P," or even place it neatly under a very businesslike moniker such as "Distributed Resource Sharing," peer-to-peer networking, which is networking that eliminates, or greatly reduces, the need for a server and instead allows clients to directly connect and exchange data among themselves, is changing the way we think about accomplishing some tasks.

THE STATE OF THE ART
Six months after I wrote my last Internet Zone column on peer-to-peer networking, the landscape of peer-to-peer technologies has changed only subtly, but perhaps significantly. On the business side of things, companies are approaching peer-to-peer technologies cautiously. With few substantial applications available, that's about all they can do, but the applications demonstrated so far, especially collaborative tools such as Groove Networks' "Groove," continue to entice with their potential. On the consumer side, with seemingly small risk, a development environment rich with tools, and the public more than willing to participate, the number of consumer peer-to-peer file sharing networks has more than doubled, now totaling more than 20. That's a lot of digital trash being scooted from desktop to desktop, not to mention your company's latest software release. Despite lawsuits from the music industry that have either shut down networks or forced them to migrate from a free to a subscriber-based model, commercial music ripped off from audio CDs, films digitized from video cassettes, and even commercial software titles, can be easily plucked from some of these networks if you can figure out how they're labeled. The wild frontier of peer-to-peer, which is being driven by free open-source clients and completely decentralized network architectures such as Gnutella and Freenet, is ensuring that anything you can package as a file can be obtained by anyone with a bargain basement PC and an Internet connection. Only the fear of viruses and other deadly payload (and just a few performance and scalability problems) is keeping these networks from becoming a useable and comprehensive archive of copyrighted intellectual property.

A DEVELOPER BONANZA
Besides users of warez and porn, the big winners in the consumer file-sharing scene are developers interested in the mechanics of content delivery. I'm sure there's never been a time in computing history when you could develop a wide area network client and find yourself with 15,000 global users stressing the limits of your network architecture within months of launch. It's a fertile proving ground for new ideas and many of them come with documented architectures and freely available source code making it easy for anyone to get in on the act. And so they are. Gnutella, perhaps the most popular peer-to-peer file sharing architecture, hasn't officially released source code yet; nevertheless, there are more than 10 clients available for the Windows platform alone.

NO LAUGHING MATTER
The most interesting of the new peer-to-peer networks is Ohaha, (the name has no particular meaning but is intended to invoke a sense of simplicity) an open-source peer-to-peer network built primarily by Ukrainian and Russian programmers. Their initial goal is merely to create the largest, fastest, and most scalable file-sharing network in the world. To that end, the Ohaha developers claim to have built a state-of-the-art edge-caching peer-to-peer network that works in a similar way to Akamai, the well-known commercial content-delivery network. Citing the performance and scalability problems with Gnutella, the Ohaha developers describe their peer-to-peer data distribution system as "Gnutella meets Akamai" and their index and search management as "Napster meets Open Directory Project." Ohaha's implementation does seem elegant. The protocol is layered on top of HTTP, so it's basically supported everywhere, and it uses XML for data representation. The client is implemented as a plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser (Windows only at the moment), so it uses common browser widgets and runs inside an application that's already familiar to most users. One of the key attributes of its implementation, and one that almost guarantees ongoing popularity with users, is that clients can tie in to other peer-to-peer networks and make their content part of Ohaha. Thus, Ohaha users can search and retrieve files from other popular peer-to-peer networks such as Gnutella. Though Ohaha might appear at first to be just another exercise in free speech, the Ohaha developers are building controls into their system to keep it more sane than other peer-to-peer networks. An interesting anti-spam file identifier scheme, for example, makes it possible to uniquely identify files on a network-wide scale so that people can't easily introduce duplicate files onto the network as they can with some other peer-to-peer networks. The identifier system also makes it possible to give each file a unique URL so that even people without the Ohaha installed plug-in can retrieve files using just their web browser. With such a sophisticated architecture in the works, and no stockholders to worry about, the Ohaha developers aren't afraid to claim that their architecture can scale to millions of users, and that there may be salient business applications for their network. "By virtue of hopefully being on millions of people's desktops, we can offer businesses the ultimate edge-cache solution, a content-delivery solution that's essentially a terabit network, in terms of bandwidth, at low cost," says Roland Treu, an independent consultant who serves as a spokesperson and adviser to the Ohaha project. Developed over the past seven months, Ohaha is the best example yet of a group of developers quickly leveraging both new, and not so new, content-delivery architectures in an attempt to make something that works better.

GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS
Remember Windows For Workgroups and Netware Lite? That was peer-to-peer networking in the early 1990's. Those products let small workgroup LANs operate peer-to-peer so that users could share files without using a server. The Internet, plus substantial improvements in PC hardware, have added a new twist to that old idea. Now, the Internet's millions of interconnected computers and their collective resources are the target of peer-to-peer implementations. For IT departments, the scariest thing about a global network such as the Internet can be summed up in one word: management. There may well be billions of unused CPU cycles on all those computers, and perhaps millions of gigabytes of storage, but managing those resources is the biggest nightmare one could imagine. A sensible place to start is standards and there's at least one organization that wants to create some. The New Productivity Initiative, an industry consortium of software and hardware vendors including Compaq, HP, SGI, and others, banded together last month to create a reference model and set of APIs for what they call Distributed Resource Management. Their goals encompass management issues of peer-to-peer networks but also include more general issues such as monitoring, remote authentication, and virtual single-system image. While The New Productivity Initiative is going to focus on management of distributed resource sharing, another unrelated group, the Working Group on Peer-To-Peer, an industry consortium led by Intel, is focusing on peer-to-peer infrastructure issues. This may well be the group where actual standards for peer-to-peer file sharing and related technologies get fast-tracked.

A COUPLE OF APPS
File sharing is what most people associate with peer-to-peer right now--even the latest version of Eudora Pro 5.0 has peer-to-peer file sharing built in--but more interesting applications are starting to appear. Lotus founder Ray Ozzie's new collaborative environment, called Groove, has been the highest profile announcement recently. Groove is a client application that gives users a tightly coupled peer-to-peer environment for collaboration. So, unlike the consumer file sharing networks which are open to all users running the associated peer-to-peer client application, Groove users only exchange files (or E-mail, or other data) among members of their private workgroup. The architecture is well thought-out and the client, which you can download for free, is worth taking for a spin. For those interested in harnessing the extra cycles on PCs across their enterprise, Turbolinux has a product called Enfuzion that can allocate your machines' extra CPU cycles toward computation-intensive tasks. Using Enfuzion, it's possible to achieve supercomputer CPU bandwidth using only spare cycles on servers and desktops in an enterprise LAN. If you'd rather not use the machines in your enterprise, but you still want to utilize some large-scale CPU bandwidth, Entropia has Entropia 2000, which lets you utilize their global army of desktops, and they also offer a separate server product for enterprise LANs.

END NOTE
A few interesting business applications, some standards in the works, and a wild file-sharing frontier--they hardly seem like the making of a revolution, but they're enough to keep entrepreneurs and developers busy, and keep the public on its toes.

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