Universities Developing Internal, Controlled P2P System

sukottoX writes "Penn State along with MIT and the University of British Columbia are developing a P2P application (called LionShare in the PSU incarnation) to be used only by students, faculty and staff. According to this article at the Penn State Daily Collegian, the file-sharing program, which wouldn't be completed until 2005 at the earliest, would log each transaction, allowing illegal use of the network to be traced. The purpose of this is to lessen the load on servers for tasks such as professors sending files to students, thereby decreasing the amount of manpower necessary to administer them. Funding will come in part by a grant from the Mellon Foundation, as well as from the students' information technology fee."

Comments

Re:Do universities actually need this?

[SoTuA]

Well, I have seen my university's servers "slashdotted" just before tests and such (when the _humble_ box serving the course management pages get lots of hits)

This would be a way to ease up on that. Plus, a well-done system would have very good classification of material and no spoofs (no porn instead of lecture notes), so that one can download all of the pertinent materials of a given course, easy.

Plus, think of the sharing potential. One could share class notes (I have a friend who takes his class notes using a pda, writes straight to latex. The resulting .dvi files were VERY much sought after), material between universities, get data from a course I don't remember and I need to remember *right now*, etc.

as for illegit uses..

[gl4ss]

dozens of university networks(student housing) run local directconnect hubs for anything. helps cut the traffic out of the network too..

and as for legit uses, there's practically no need for such system. local data transfers are CHEAP, and so is hd, it's no biggie to have fast networks that make the need for it(p2p) practically nil(actually it makes more sense to have most such data few centralised servers).

oh well, i guess some universities run their storage servers off from dsl or something.