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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."
Is there pr0n on this so called internet 2?
I think the Internet2 users should use Kazaa Lite and eMule just like the rest of us. Throw caution to the wind, screw the RIAA.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
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.
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.
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'll be a good boy next year, you can believe it.
Thanks in advance,
Johnny
From this page you can see a graphic representation of the Application Layer and Local Layer this program works in (I2). From the description below we can see that this is more like every ISP making local copies of large files available!
Also, a Director for this stuff hints at it being a fee-based in the future. (More documentation here)
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?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
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.
Belive in Technology and AMAZE yourself. -- RIP ZDTV/TechTV
Oh, and as soon as Freenet gets N.G Routing working nicely, BitTorrent will be obsolete [/flamebait] ;-)
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.
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
LINUX USERS ON INTERNET2 NETWORKS ENJOY THE BENEFITS OF LOGISTICAL NETWORKING
PHOENIX, AZ - November 17, 2003 - Linux users on Internet2 networks are enjoying the benefits of a new approach to high performance content distribution, called Logistical Networking, which will be on display this week in the Internet2 booth at SC2003 in Phoenix, AZ. Developed by a research team from the Logistical Computing and Internetworking (LoCI) Laboratory at the University of Tennessee, Logistical Networking (LN) combines state-of-the-art data transfer technology with storage resources provisioned throughout the network to create a convenient and powerful new paradigm for distributed data management.
To test this technology, the LoCI team has used the 22 terabyte (TB) testbed of LN "depots" deployed across Internet2 networks to create an ad hoc content distribution network for distributing 650 megabyte (MB) CD-images (called "ISO's") of Linux and FreeBSD software. Users are now employing the Logistical Runtime System (LoRS) tools to download these ISO's at speeds of 30 to 80 megabits per second (Mbps)--roughly tens times faster than from traditional HTTP or FTP mirror sites. Downloads for gigabit Ethernet connected users can exceed 150 Mbps.
"We think that this kind of network storage infrastructure paves the way for a new era in content distribution," said Dr. Micah Beck, Co-Director of LoCI Laboratory and the chair of Internet2's Network Storage Special Interest Group. "For example, although using multiple copies and multiple TCP streams to increase transfer speed is similar to what some peer-to-peer systems do, with our fixed but shared infrastructure of well connected nodes, you can scale up the size of the content without sacrificing performance."
What makes this unique combination of flexibility and performance possible is an XML encoded metadata file called an exNode. A content publisher who uploads a file to the testbed of LN depots, which is called the Logistical Backbone (L-Bone), receives an exNode containing metadata that maps the segments of the file's content to L-Bone storage allocations, which are time-limited to make them more shareable. A single exNode can represent content that has been fragmented across multiple depots to accommodate large sizes, replicated to ensure fault tolerance, or both replicated and geographically dispersed to improve accessibility and performance. A single exNode used to distribute a Linux ISO represents eight copies of the ISO's content, which has been broken up into 8-20MB chunks and spread across L-Bone depots nationwide.
Publishing content that has been stored in the L-Bone is as simple as sharing the exNode that represents it. Since exNodes are text files, they can be published via HTTP, sent as e-mail attachments, or passed on a floppy disk. When they are posted on a Web site, as with the exNodes for Linux ISOs, the result is called an exNode Distribution Network, or XDN. To access the content in an XDN, users simply retrieve the relevant exNode from the site, and then use them with the LoRS tools to download the content. The LoRS tools are freely available and easy to set up, have a convenient GUI, and run on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and all common variants of UNIX and Linux. The LoRS tools make fast, mulitsource/multistream downloads routine for Internet2 users when the content is suitably replicated, as in the Linux XDN,
"As compared to some of the other things we're doing with Logistical Networking, like managing the data sets from supercomputer simulations or accelerating remote browsing of massive image databases, putting up an XDN is a pretty simple application that anyone on Internet2 can do," explains Dr. Beck. "And prototype applications like IBPvo show that there are some easy variations on XDN that can automate different parts of the process."
IBPvo is an Internet2-enabled personal video recorder (PVR) service created to show the flexibility of LN technology. Like TiVo or ReplayTV, IBPvo can be scheduled in advance
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....
You think the Internet2 is cool?
Wait until Paris Hilton sex tape #2 hits the P2P networks on OUR internet.
How you gonna DEAL WITH THAT, INTERNET2? HOW? YOU CAN'T TOUCH THIS.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Kirk would kick Picards little French butt all over the vinyard. Then he'd bang all the whores in Paris.
The way to go here is to make serving content through bittorrent easier. Ideally, as easy as publishing a resource on a web server (that is, copy a file into a directory and figure out what the URL is). This is the goal of the mod_torrent project. We're building an apache plugin on top of libtorrent which automatically creates torrents in response to http requests, and then begins serving them, in response to conditions on the apache server. Load is low? Fine, service with good-old HTTP the normal way. Load is high? Instead of a direct HTTP download, instead have the HTTP GET respond with an application/torrent file, which then launches bt to grab the content (all automatic). Goodbye slashdot effect.
Aww, good for those Internet2 users. All 15 of them.
As mentioned earlier, Internet2 is NOT what it sounds like. It's just another high-speed WAN, like the commercial backbones, but because it's *cough* academic only *cough* it's got a lot less traffic and there are no artificial speed bumps.
See when you get an internet connection, of any kind, you usually get wired up for a LOT more bandwidth than you buy, but the ISP caps it to make a market.
On the Internet2 there are different grades of connection, but a huge number of schools are chatting to each other at 155Mbps, full-rate ATM. If you're in a dorm at any of those schools on the I2, chances are some of your regular ho-hum web/p2p traffic flows through the I2.
The real advantages of the I2 project are reduced school ISP costs, as inter-school traffic doesn't have to traverse a commercial line, and much better collaborative access for research, development, and distance-learning.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails