NSF Grants for Decentralized Infrastructure Research

billbaggins writes "The NSF has given a grant to the IRIS project to research something called Distributed Hash Tables as a tool for creating networks that don't have "centralized points of vulnerability". The chief purpose seems to be to stop DoS attacks, intentional or otherwise. Check out their press release (text or Word format) and also the news coverage (CNN and NYTimes, among others)."

P2P platform to build upon.

[chris_7d0h]

Hmm. It seems this could be used to cut down on the time spent doing nitty-gritty stuff on each P2P project. "Gnutella like" projects might in the future spend more time doing GUI clients instead of implementing P2P specifications and protocols.

It will be interesting to see which areas are going to be covered. I guess a way of identification will be included, so the "traditional" P2P projects will probably have to spend some time counter the identification stuff as well.

This is distributed implementation

[chris_7d0h]

Funny thing, last few years people have been calling client/server systems distributed systems. For me they are not distributed as the architect has simply decided to draw a line some where between the datafocused stuff (the provider) and the end user interface fluff (the consumer) and separated the logic into two components (often on separate nodes) The relationship on a conceptual level is always 1..* where many identical consumers use one and the same provider. For me distributed is P2P where a node can both provide and consume data centered services, rather than simply relying on others provide or consume (file-swapping p2p and the SETI apps are good examples).
Anyway, that's my immediate reflection.

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