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Domain: swarmcast.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to swarmcast.com.

Comments · 8

  1. Onion Networks by Orasis · · Score: 1 · on Software Distribution via Multicast?

    Hi, I am Justin Chapweske, the inventor of OpenCola's Swarmcast. I am now working on another software project to specifically address the needs of content distribution over multicast, and the Onion Networks FEC Library is the first step in building that soluiton. The FEC library will provide the foundation of our future open source multicast content distribution software, so keep an eye out at http://onionnetworks.com for more info.

  2. Swarmcast by X · · Score: 2 · on Software Distribution via Multicast?

    This is definitely a job for Swarmcsat. It avoids most of the problems people have identified, although extensive firewalling can still undermine it.

    Alternatively, Gnutella or eDonkey like programs can be used.

  3. Re:Mirrors by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Mandrake 8.1 Released

    how about swarmcast? Here's the swarmcast URL.
    http://www.swarmcast.com/gate/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fft p.eecs.umich.edu%2Fpub%2Flinux%2Fmandrake%2Fiso%2F Mandrake80-inst.iso

  4. Re:Distributed HTTP? by X_Bones · · Score: 1 · on Suck Stops Sucking
    http://www.swarmcast.com

    It looks like it's meant for the splitting up of larger files, but it might work nicely for what you're talking about.

  5. Re:What's with this gateway thing? by Eric+Seppanen · · Score: 2 · on Swarmcast GPLed
    Everything you need to both serve and download content is released under the GPL.
    Thanks for clearing that up. You might want to have your webmaster reword the File Registration FAQ answer number 4, which basically says you must register a file (accepting the terms of the gateway agreement) to be able to "Swarmcast-enable" it. I had interpreted that as "you must use our gateway and agree to our conditions to use Swarmcast". Sorry for any confusion.
    --
  6. How Swarmcast works by bharath · · Score: 2 · on Swarmcast GPLed
    From the FAQ :
    Swarmcast breaks a file into packets, which are encoded using Forward Error Correction (FEC), a mathematical technique that Swarmcast uses to make it easy to reconstruct the file. The encoded packets are then distributed randomly to the computers that have requested the file. These computers become nodes in the mesh (a temporary network) that Swarmcast creates for this download.

    Each node receives only a portion of the original packets. But each node is also aware of some of the other nodes receiving packets. Even as a node receives a packet, it also rebroadcasts it to other nodes, so packets are rapidly swapped back and forth.

    As each packet is received, the receiving node checks to see if it is useful in rebuilding the file; if it is, Swarmcast decodes that packet. As soon as a receiving node receives sufficient useful packets, it reconstructs the file. Thanks to FEC, a Swarmcast download is a bit like playing poker when every card in the deck is a wild card: as soon as you've received five cards, you can build a winning hand.

    So there seems to be some amount of redundancy built in, provided enough servers are running at a time. When I tried it out, there was just one provider, but at 500Kbps.

  7. What's with this gateway thing? by Eric+Seppanen · · Score: 3 · on Swarmcast GPLed
    What's with the "swarmcast gateway" that you have to use? If all we're getting is a GPLed client to an ultra-proprietary secret server, forgive me for not getting too exited.

    Still a cool idea, but if OpenCola wants everybody to put eggs in their basket, maybe somebody should release a GPLed server too...
    --

  8. already done. by gargle · · Score: 2 · on Interview with Bruce Maggs

    What if everyone's browser was capable of serving requests for that cached data? This would not be efficient for sites with only a little traffic, but for /.ted sites or CNN and the like, it would work very well. The problem is finding another client that has the data you want cached, this might be resolveable using either peering groups (like routers and gnutella), or using a central server to track it all (like napster).

    There're tons of companies/groups working on variations of the same idea. To name a few:
    swarmcast, allcast, etc. So far none of them have taken off. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why.