Better Than Bit Torrent, For Internet2 Users?

FastDownload writes "New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy. It's called Logistical Networking and is being developed at the University of Tennessee. Though there are some obvious similarities to Bit Torrent, Logistical Networking uses fixed, shared infrastructure instead of being peer-to-peer, which makes it useful for moving big content even when no peers are available."

Comments

P2P is NOT Going Anywhere

[Preach the Good Word]

Especially for legal content... bit torrent has made it so that you can get all sorts of legal content like game demos, linux distros, etc. off p2p without having to be on horribly slow ftp servers.

BitTorrent is too ad-hoc

[Space cowboy]

I was considering setting up a download of a database dump for hostip.info using BitTorrent, but it's too awkward to create, and there's no guarantee that there's any saving, as far as I can see (people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle). Instead, I let people download the meta-data, and construct the DB - much faster :-)

The idea of fixed nodes is less "cool" I guess, with less of the "dynamic network adapting to the load", but probably more useful...

Simon.

Re:BitTorrent is too ad-hoc

[koreth]

people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle

Generally it's a good idea to run a seed for your files if you're running a tracker. That way everyone will always have at least one source for the file -- i.e., you fall back to roughly the download performance level you'd have without BitTorrent, with people downloading from your server.

If you just run a tracker and don't provide an always-on source for the actual underlying files, then yeah, BitTorrent will pretty much suck for infrequently-accessed files.

Re:BitTorrent is too ad-hoc

[yerricde]

people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle

As long as the first publisher of the file leaves a BT window open, nobody is "stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle."

Re:Of course, the important question is....

[Matey-O]

You'll get is when you pay cubic buttloads of cash to hook yourself up. You think that $45 Cable ISP fee is arbitrarily set?

Re:Yeah right... linux isos.....

[Urgo]

That is definitely not true. Bit Torrent has a lot of legitimate uses. I used Bit Torrent to download an ISO for clusterknoppix and the multi-disk ISO's for red hat when their servers were swamped. Bit Torrent is a great concept that is not going to be going away. It's sort of like multicasting over the traditional internet structure. I see BT only growing is variations and uses in the future both for good and bad.

Oh please

[Sanity]

This sounds like Akamai, you still need to pay for server bandwidth - it isn't competitive with P2P content delivery networks like BT.

Oh, and as soon as Freenet gets N.G Routing working nicely, BitTorrent will be obsolete [/flamebait] ;-)

I wouldn't say 'better' exactly, just different

[RalphBNumbers]

I'd hardly call this "better than bittorrent". While the principles may be similar, the target users are entirely different.

Bittorrent is for people who can barely afford to run their one server, and need others to take some of the load off.

This seems to be targeted at people who can set up a whole bunch of servers in a bunch of locations, and just want to use them efficiently to deliver huge content very quickly.

What if a node goes down?

[menscher]

Bittorrent works well, because it doesn't matter if one of your peers dies. There are lots of others. (When I downloaded the Fedora ISOs, for example, there were hundreds of peers.)

This new thing looks like each site has a piece of your data. If one site loses everything, then wouldn't any file that had even a piece of it in that site be forever lost? Sounds like a distributed RAID0 (stripe) array to me. And everyone knows that reliability of those goes down as you add more stripes....