Peer-to-peer systems The P2P systems differ in their architecture.
Some do not have any
centralized infrastructure, whereas others have a dedicated controller, but
The distributed systems discussed in Chapter 2 allow access to resources in a this controller is not involved in resource-intensive operations. For example,
tightly controlled environment. System administrators enforce security rules Skype has a central site to maintain user accounts; users sign in and pay for
and control the allocation of physical rather than virtual resources. In all models specific activities at this site. The controller for a BOINC platform maintains
of network-centric computing prior to utility computing, a user maintains direct membership and is involved in task distribution to participating systems. The
control of the software and the data residing on remote systems. . P2P systems nodes with abundant resources in systems without any centralized
can be regarded as one of the precursors of today’s clouds. This new model for infrastructure often act as supernodes and maintain information useful to
distributed computing promoted the idea of low-cost access to storage and increasing the system efficiency, such as indexes of the available content.
central processing unit (CPU) cycles provided by participant systems; in this
case, the resources are located in different administrative domains. Often the Each node maintains a table of overlay links connecting it with other nodes
P2P systems are self-organizing and decentralized, whereas the servers in a of this virtual network, each node being identified by its IP address. Two
cloud are in a single administrative domain and have a central management. types of overlay networks, unstructured and structured, are used by P2P
systems. Random walks starting from a few bootstrap nodes are usually
P2P systems exploit the network infrastructure to provide access to distributed used by systems desiring to join an unstructured overlay. Each node of a
computing resources. Decentralized applications developed in the 1980s, such structured overlay has a unique key that determines its position in the
as Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), a protocol for email distribution, and structure; the keys are selected to guarantee a uniform distribution in a very
Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP), an application protocol for large name space. Structured overlay networks use key-based routing (KBR);
dissemination of news articles, are early examples of P2P systems. Systems given a starting node v0 and a key k, the function K B R(v0, k) returns the
developed in the late 1990s, such as the music-sharing system Napster, gave path in the graph from v0 to the vertex with key k. Epidemic algorithms
participants access to storage distributed over the network, while the first discussed in Section 7.12 are often used by unstructured overlays to
volunteer-based scientific computing, SETI@home, used free cycles of disseminate network topology.
participating systems to carry out compute-intensive tasks.
The P2P model represents a significant departure from the client-server model,
the cornerstone of distributed applications for several decades. P2P systems
have several desirable properties
They require a minimally dedicated infrastructure, since resources are
contributed by the participating systems.
• They are highly decentralized.
• They are scalable; the individual nodes are not required to be aware of the
global state.
• They are resilient to faults and attacks, since few of their elements are critical
for the delivery of service and the abundance of resources can support a high
degree of replication
