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Convergence of P2P and Grid Predicted 117

Posted by michael from the assimilation dept.
tom_conte writes "From the proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS'03), "On Death, Taxes, and the Convergence of Peer-to-Peer and Grid Computing" compares the two current popular incarnations of distributed computing technology, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid Computing. It also predicts the convergence of the two technologies: "The complementary nature of the strengths and weaknesses of the two approaches suggests that the interests of the two communities are likely to grow closer over time." This paper is worth reading if you want to clear up the marketing cloud that surrounds these two technologies and sometimes makes them hard to distinguish."
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Convergence of P2P and Grid Predicted More

Convergence of P2P and Grid Predicted

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  • Sounds like... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ObviousGuy ( 578567 ) <ObviousGuy@hotmail.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @07:49PM (#5437139) Homepage Journal
    Sounds like the P2P folks are getting a little antsy looking for any evidence that P2P isn't just a really good way to encourage copyright infringement.

    Grid computing can survive just as well without P2P. I'm not so sure that it's the same in reverse.

    • Re:Sounds like... (Score:2, Informative)

      by LegendLength ( 231553 )
      Sorry but P2P has inherit qualities that are just as important as copyright infringement: caching, load distribution etc.

    • Seti@home (Score:3, Insightful)

      by bigsexyjoe ( 581721 )
      What about the Seti P2P system. Who does that steal from? Well, what can we expect since you clearly commented before having time to read the story? Just so you know the story's focus was more techinical and it talk about what a P2P network is abstractly. It discussed what it could be when combined with Grid Computing.

      It is a serious well supported argument. You are just shooting your mouth off with ad hominiem attacks which probably aren't valid.

      • Actually (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ObviousGuy ( 578567 )
        If you redefine anything that you like into terms that you find useful, then you can make your argument look really good.

        If we redefine P2P from being a way of copying software and music to a way of sharing computational code across a network, then it all becomes so much more acceptable.

        It's a conference for P2P. Did you really think they'd come out and say that it's a hopeless dead end? Did you expect they'd say that unless they can justify it's existence that P2P will be called a piracy tool?

      • Re:Seti@home (Score:3, Informative)

        by dan the person ( 93490 )
        What Seti P2P system?

        Seti is plain client server.

        My seti client doesn't talk to your seti client. They both report back to a central server.
        • Errr, but the "server" is actually quite useless without the "clients", that's why I guess SETI@home belongs into the distributed computing corner of the P2P realm.
          • A Web server is also quite useless without any clients to browse the information it provides.

            Does that mean a webserver is peer to peer?

            No.

            A fileserver is quite useles without any clients to store files on it and read files from it.

            Does that mean a file server is peer to peer?
            No.

            Peer to peer means you have peers communicating with peers.

            In seti you have a massive specialised central server and you have clients. The clients aren't at all a peer of the server. It's client/server computing not p2p computing.

            Seti would only belong in the "P2P realm" if it was P2P and it's not!

    • Re:Sounds like... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by JMZorko ( 150414 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @12:16AM (#5438343) Homepage
      I've been involved in a lot of P2P work, and it is definitely a wonderful technology, and it also solves a big problem -- it is an enabler for reaching ever-larger numbers of people / clients. P2P systems can be implemented such that the more clients participate, the more room there is for clients to participate. Like the article says, P2P solves the "my parent node failed" problem pretty well (by dynamically reconnecting to another parent node).

      Really -- if you want examples of P2P use that aren't the often over-hyped file-sharing scenarios, imagine an FTP server that can scale really well, i.e. the more people who are using it, the more capacity it has. Imagine SOMA FM being able to stream to orders of magnitude more people than it does now, by having clients on fat pipes reflect the stream they're getting to others. Sure, there are still problems to solve in this case (latency, especially for live-as-it-happens type content) but the potential, I think, is incredible.

      Regards,

      John

      • Re:Sounds like... (Score:3, Informative)

        by bigberk ( 547360 )
        I'm involved with P2P research at my university. I think once people start the see the greater implications of the technology they won't be so quick to label it as a black/grey (this is a knee-jerk reaction from the music industry that may last yet for a few years).

        P2P is a solution to massive content distribution; any kind of content. And there are different scales. P2P may show itself in many ways in the near future, whether you're chillin' to SomaFM [somafm.com], backing up your data to/from a redudant multipeer network, or maybe distributing large content from a web site and benefiting from clients' bandwidth for peer to peer redistribution.
    • as a new slashdot user, in my opinion p2p is more than just a pirate central. it seems to me that p2p could be used for many other applications, such as higher fault tollerence on networks. computer A wants to retrive a webpage off computer B, the administrator of computer B accidently kicks the cat5 cable out, uh uo, computer A cant get the webpage. with p2p, every computer on the network could have copies of certin pages on the website, and computer B could be automaticaly redirected to any of these other sources of the same webpage. theres a real world scenario (sort of) that proves p2p isnt just about copyright infiringment.

  • The future of the Grid (Score:5, Interesting)

    by deanj ( 519759 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @07:58PM (#5437184)
    The grid has been trying to gear up from academia/research for so long, I can't even remember when I first heard of it.

    In the aftermath of the dot com crash, companies are falling over themselves trying to snag onto the "next big thing".

    Now we have two different worlds colliding, with people pushing 'em that have been ignoring each other all this time.

    They've at least recognized this, however, there's still a HUGE problem.

    They can't make it easy for the average person to install and use.

    They (the Grid folks in particular) seem to be missing this, big time. Globus is NOT easy to install...it's not an out of box experience like any of the P2P things are. It's a multi-day install, and you have to know what the heck you're doing.

    Secondly, the world doesn't need yet another Corba-like thing to make everything interoperate with everything else with MORE glue on top of it. KQML should have taught people this lesson back when that was all the rage in agent systems. If you want two systems to talk to each other, couple 'em in whatever language you want and stick to it.

    There's so much extra overhead in doing tasks that "the grid" is supposed to take care of....man, I wish these people would just sit back and take notice of the other distributed systems out there that are out there and working and solving problems without foisting yet another distributed computing paradigm (oh hell, I can't believe I used that word...forgive me), on the world.

    Lord knows we don't need it entangling reasonably well put together P2P systems with the tentacles of the heavy-weight "Grid".

    • Re:The future of the Grid (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BWJones ( 18351 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:02PM (#5437207) Homepage Journal
      They (the Grid folks in particular) seem to be missing this, big time. Globus is NOT easy to install...it's not an out of box experience like any of the P2P things are. It's a multi-day install, and you have to know what the heck you're doing.

      Apple seems to be on top of this with technologies such as TCP/IP over Firewire and most notably, Rendezvous technology. The potential here is amazing.

    • Re:The future of the Grid (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:09PM (#5437487)
      Posting anon because I'm involved in a grid project and want to speak *my* mind instead of having to act as a responsible member of the team.

      The grid has been trying to gear up from academia/research for so long, I can't even remember when I first heard of it.

      About eight years.

      In the aftermath of the dot com crash, companies are falling over themselves trying to snag onto the "next big thing".

      Please enumerate these companies. I'd love to consider them as possible customers. Currently grid computing is mostly met with, well deserved, skeptisism.

      Now we have two different worlds colliding, with people pushing 'em that have been ignoring each other all this time.

      Grossly unfair. At least from the grid side we've long considered p2p and there are even working groups discussing this intersection in GGF.

      They can't make it easy for the average person to install and use.

      Bullocks on two counts.

      1) *average people* don't and shouldn't use gridware yet.

      2) The dominent gridware is trivial to install compared to the problems it solves. It's like saying that you want to take a crack a proving an ancient theorem but you don't want to have to learn any math. TS.

      They (the Grid folks in particular) seem to be missing this, big time. Globus is NOT easy to install.

      Again, wrong on two counts.

      1) Globus is not the grid. Globus is *a* project developing gridware.

      2) Globus is fucking trivial to install (and I'm not on their staff). Maybe not as easy to install as kazaa, but then gridware is targetted at people who want to do more with the internet than look at pictures of Gillian Anderson's pussy. That said, review point one. There are other grids available.

      Secondly, the world doesn't need yet another Corba-like thing to make everything interoperate with everything else with MORE glue on top of it.

      Now there's an almost complete lack of content. Not a single grid development house is going in this direction. There is a *broad* consensus that using open communications protocols (i.e. web services) is the way to go instead of making something proprietary.

      KQML should have taught people this lesson back when that was all the rage in agent systems.

      Right, because agent systems and grid are *so* similar.

      Come on now, KQML was a language for doing REST (to a first approximation) a grid is a far more complex concept.

      If you want two systems to talk to each other, couple 'em in whatever language you want and stick to it.

      Again, a complete and utter lack of understanding what the grid is about. Your comment amounts to having a cabal of grid programmers bless a particular language and then demand that everyone write to it. Dumb. Not that there aren't language bigots in the grid community that would do that if they could, but dumb nonetheless.

      man, I wish these people would just sit back and take notice of the other distributed systems out there that are out there and working and solving problems without foisting yet another distributed computing paradigm (oh hell, I can't believe I used that word...forgive me), on the world.

      I wish luddites would do a bit of reading and educate themselves before assuming that everything they didn't come up with is nonesense. Especially luddites who have *no* idea the depth of the library at my company.

      The grid solves problems that exist and aren't being solved in other ways except through enormous investment by each and every company that wants to solve them for themselves.

      Another analogy. Your comment is akin to demanding that instead of adopting Windows (which is a hassle to install, run and keep secure) that they instead write their own operating system tuned to their own needs. Sillyness.

      Hugs and kisses from the future.

      • In the practicle department, we have two technologies we've used for grid computing. I'm going to guess you work on one we've used, Sun Gridware (now opensourced?) used to be Codine. It worked well enough. The interface was pretty easy, but for the users, kicking off programs to run randomly on a grid of machines was not as easy as...

        Mosix (or OpenMosix). Now I'm sure theres a hundred good reasons why it doesn't qualify as gridware, but that is how we use it. It was simple to install and monitor also. Hidden enough, the engineers don't even know they are using it. Thats the kind of plug and play every IT manager wants.

        The convergence, I agree is going to happen. But honestly today people just haven't become sophisticated enough to expect it yet. Or even want to. Perhaps it won't happen in our lifetime.

        -------------
        OnRoad [onlawn.net]: Boldly searching for the efficiency our engines deserve.

      • Re:The future of the Grid (Score:4, Funny)

        by HaveBlue34 ( 142274 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @01:50AM (#5438735)
        gridware is targetted at people who want to do more with the internet than look at pictures of Gillian Anderson's pussy.

        If thats not a marketing slogan, I don't know what is.
      • Posting anon because I'm involved in a grid project and want to speak *my* mind instead of having to act as a responsible member of the team.

        I'd say I know who you are, but you use both more profanity and punctuation than the person I'm thinking of. So...hi.
      • Please enumerate these companies. I'd love to consider them as possible customers. Currently grid computing is mostly met with, well deserved, skeptisism

        I mean companies like IBM who are looking for the same customers you are.

        Globus is fucking trivial to install

        Unless Globus has gotten a helluva lot easier to install in a recent release, "fucking trivial" is a load of bullshit. I've done, and other people I know have done, several installs each, with people that knew what they were doing, and I'm telling you, even with that help, it took at least two days of farking around to get it to install properly.

        So I call major bullshit on "fucking trivial"

        Right, because agent systems and grid are *so* similar.

        Come on now, KQML was a language for doing REST (to a first approximation) a grid is a far more complex concept

        No shit. The panacea of KQML was that "everything will talk to everything else", just like the grid, and Corba. You know what? Everyone dropped KQML because they realized they DIDN'T need to talk to everyone else. They just needed to talk to themselves. You end up with so much extra baggage because of this it ends up being a complete pain in the ass.

        Again, a complete and utter lack of understanding what the grid is about. Your comment amounts to having a cabal of grid programmers bless a particular language and then demand that everyone write to it. Dumb. Not that there aren't language bigots in the grid community that would do that if they could, but dumb nonetheless This completely misses the point. The point isn't to have everyone write in the same language, it's to have a simple system for people to use. The extra hurdles that people have to get their programming language usable on the grid aren't trivial, and not every language is supported. It adds complexity to the system that shouldn't be required.

        The grid solves problems that exist and aren't being solved in other ways except through enormous investment by each and every company that wants to solve them for themselves. Well, now's the time for me to call bullshit. No one is doing this now...they might in the future, but I seriously doubt it. Companies aren't going to be forking over their computations to other companies to do, when they can do what they've been doing in house. More hardware might be sold, but it won't be shared.

        In the end, if the grid does actually get used anywhere, it'll be in-house, or in academia. And even there, people are arguing which place is the right place to host most of the activities...which, is completely STUPID, IMHO, because it completely misses the point! I've been in those meetings where they're deciding "where we'll concentrate our X computations" and "site Z will be where we concentrate our Y capabilities". Holy living crap! I've never seen anything so farked up in my life. There are a lot of really pissed off people here because of that.

        Another analogy. Your comment is akin to demanding that instead of adopting Windows (which is a hassle to install, run and keep secure) that they instead write their own operating system tuned to their own needs. Sillyness

        This completely makes my point. We don't need another one of these things. There are plenty of lighter weight alternatives out there which people have developed and have been using for the last few years. One great example is Cisco's Spanish Inquistion built on top of Jini. (spare me the language bigotry...not you...the other readers of this).

        I wish luddites would do a bit of reading and educate themselves before assuming that everything they didn't come up with is nonesense.

        And double at ya....most of the last eight years (and my involvement has been for the last six) has been pedaling this crap. The dot.com crash is what made people latch onto this. Before that, you couldn't give it away...which is ironic, because they were.

    • Remember that one.....

      I used to Believe it...(not any more)

      but you know what this convergence of P2P and Grid sounds logical...I choose to believe!
      • Erm, what would you call the TV appliances like TiVo? How about HDTV?

        Consider the possibility that some things take longer to converge than one might expect.
      • Er, they have.

        My ISP and my cable company are the same legal person, same bill--and I can even rent a specalized "TV computer" from them if I want to.

        Wait until digital HDTV becomes prominent, and network-wired houses are as common as telephone lines today. TV and PC will converge--it's just going to move along a multistep process at the speed of the slowest partner.

  • Killer app of the '00s (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Enry ( 630 ) <enry.wayga@net> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @07:58PM (#5437186) Journal
    Noone can really define it, everyone wants an app that can do it, and companies that claim to do it are getting a lot of interest.

    Ecch.

    • Re:Killer app of the '00s (Score:3, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 )
      Noone can really define it, everyone wants an app that can do it, and companies that claim to do it are getting a lot of interest.
      ARRRGH! Will you people click the @%$#! link??

      Section 2: Defining Terms
      The popularity of both Grid and P2P have led to a number of (often contradictory) definitions. We assume here that...

      • Even defining it doesn't help.

        I was at a user meeting for a 'grid computing' company, where they had a bunch of customers come in and give presentations about how they were using it in their environment.

        Every single person that got up had a different definition for grid computing. Even employees of said company had different definitions.

        This is exactly like saying something is 'web enabled' back in 1995. Everything had to be web enabled, and everything was, so long as your definition was very vague.
    • Last time this happened, no one ever defined "it", no one ever provided an app that was guaranteed to do "it", and the companies never delivered on those claims and fucked up the economy. Hopefully we'll be smarter this time.
    • I know one thing. I was blown away by these stats [sprint ipmon project] [sprintlabs.com]

      When the volume of the app outweighs the www, you know something BIG is goin' on.

      The real issue is the desire for decentralisation. That desire is irrefutable.

  • Grid Computing, (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Visaris ( 553352 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:00PM (#5437198) Journal
    As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well.

    It seems as though this system would inherently be P2P. It's good to know the P2P people are starting to realize that there is more the P2P than file sharing. As for the grid people, they knew their system could be called "Peer to Peer" all along.

    • Re:Grid Computing, (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well.

      Sounds like Borg computing.
      • hehe, i was just about to reply to this w/o reading the other reply, i was gonna use the borg collective as an example... hehe -.- . and to my knoldage (correct me if im wrong) but grids still use one central master server to conrol all the other work stations connected to the network, the idea of p2p (as we all know) is everyone is equal, so everyone can use the grid whos connected to it. but on another note (just a thought poped into my head) wouldnt a p2p grid negat the purpose of a grid? to use the EXTRA resources on the grid? if everyone needed to use these EXTRA resources, wouldnt there not be enough to go around? there would need to be nodes connected that do no work that everyone else could leech off of for the idea to make sence. (i dont know much about gride, i have done .some. research, but have not tried to install or manage one, i do know a good ammount about p2p tho. this is just my view point/questions. id like to hear what the rest of you think...

    • Re:Grid Computing, (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:28PM (#5437325)
      "As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well."

      Anybody else read that and get a vision of the Borg? Are we headed that way?

      Heh. Just found that interesting. Lots of stuff talking to lots of other stuff. Emergent properties are bound to appear, right?

    • Re:Grid Computing, (Score:5, Insightful)

      by smd4985 ( 203677 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:27PM (#5437611) Homepage
      Some current Gnutella clients could do grid computing pretty easily - I think the question is demand. LimeWire uses Java so technically one could create a 'JobInterface' that could be divided amongst peers for execution (definitely abstracting some issues). The big problem is that the common user doesn't have the need to write programs that need help from disparate peers. Not until there is a very high-level programming language that Joe User could make effective use of AND Joe User has a need for a lot of CPU cycles will Grid Computing features in P2P networks make sense.

      Then again, perhaps it is a case of "If you build it, they will come."
      • This could be done very easily by combining limewire with e.g. the aglet tools (a mobile agents api) from IBM. For normal users the use would be limited but you can easily create private gnutella networks (for example set up a network with some research colleagues). Mobile agents and grid computing are both solutions in search of a problem. Combined they might actually find some use somewhere.

    • Re:Grid Computing, (Score:5, Informative)

      by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:34PM (#5437649) Homepage
      As my professor described it, is a system similar to a power grid. You can plug in anywhere, and use the resources (Disk, Memory, CPU) of the grid for computation. Your resources would be added to the "grid collective" as well. It seems as though this system would inherently be P2P.
      Actually, if you take a moment to at least skim the article, you'll see that the Slashdot headline isn't exactly correct. This article doesn't actually spend a whole lot of time predicting a "convergence" of Grid computing and P2P.

      What it says, as far as I see it, in a nutshell:

      • Grid computing and P2P have similar goals, and are each an attempt to address many of the same problems.
      • The Grid and P2P approaches tackle these problems from different directions.
      • Before either is completely successful, a system will probably emerge that incorporates elements of both.
      So in that sense, yes, he's predicting some convergence. But on the other hand, what most of the paper seems to do is both compare and contrast the P2P and Grid approaches, so that people like you who say, "Wait a minute! This Grid stuff and this P2P stuff, it all sounds like the same thing!" can finally figure out what the differences are.

      In that sense, it seems like a really great paper, the kind of thing I've sought after for a while now. Nice one, Ian!

    • we already have that (Score:3, Informative)

      by g4dget ( 579145 )
      You mean like Clump/OS [psoftware.org] or Plan 9 [bell-labs.com]?

      The difficulty with this is not doing it, it's doing it on top of Windows.

  • I'm going to start selling (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:00PM (#5437199)
    Wireless Grid Peer to Peer systems... With that many buzzwords, it can't miss.

  • mirror (Score:3, Informative)

    by heXXXen ( 566121 ) <cliff@pchopper.POLLOCKcom minus painter> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:01PM (#5437203)
    mirror in case in of /.'ing: http://100mbit.hexxxen.net/slashdot/death_taxes.pd f [hexxxen.net]

  • Someone has an ego problem... (Score:5, Funny)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:02PM (#5437208) Homepage
    This paper is *six* pages long, and Ian Foster has *sixteen* self-citations.

    I know some insitutions rank their faculty based on the number of times their papers are cited, but they usually exclude self-citations in those counts.

    • Re:Someone has an ego problem... (Score:5, Informative)

      by outlier ( 64928 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:19PM (#5437279)
      Actually, Foster cites himself so much because he's The Big Guy in grid computing. He's been in it since the early days, gets a huge chunk of the research funding, and is involved with lots of projects (both in terms of developing grid technology and implementing it in scientific communities).

      When you're ahead of the crowd, you don't have many peers to cite.

      Oh, and his reputation is actually pretty sound, he doesn't really need to rely on inflated citation counts, he has plenty of research dollars coming in -- that should keep his institutions (Argonne and U of Chicago) happy.

      • Re:Someone has an ego problem... (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Yeah but have you looked at some of the papers. Sheesh, some of them have like 10-20-odd some authors. Maybe its just me but it seems a bit like piling on when it comes to grid computing. I mean come on, how much have you really contributed to the paper when you are the 17th author on it? Sheesh. It seems it would be much more accurate just to list people in an Acknowledgements section and leave the authors for the ones who did most of the work/writing.


        Also as an FYI, these are bad papers to have on your C.V. unless you are the big person in the field. They amount to diddly squat unless you are the primary author or a bigwig.


        Then again, I just might be jealous of the copious amount of citations but hey, whatever floats your boat I guess. Amen to being an anonymous coward....

  • Already happening (Score:5, Informative)

    by Istealmymusic ( 573079 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:02PM (#5437213) Homepage Journal
    Ever heard of KaZaA? Remember CloudLoad and AltNet? They are an alternative, commerical peer-to-peer network piggy-backing on FastTrack; serving paid content and crunching numbers. FT is currently the largest P2P network in existance, with over 5 million users, and their hashing/encryption algorithms for peer-to-peer authentication are secret (no one has yet to reverse Kazaa), so they can do anything they damn well please. Including merging P2P and "grid" computing. Which they have already done. (I'm waiting for PFT [projectfasttrack.com] to come out and make grid computing optional.).

    • Re:Already happening (Score:5, Informative)

      by sparrow_hawk ( 552508 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:38PM (#5437670)
      This sounds like exactly what the giFT [sourceforge.net] folks were trying to do. They had their client interoperating, but Brilliant released a new version of KaZaA that broke it, so they got fed up and created their own (very nice, IMO) network based off the FastTrack idea. The same thing will probably happen to the projectfasttrack folks; the KaZaA folks don't want *anyone* else using their network, so it will be a Microsoft-style arms race times ten.

      giFT/OpenFT tends to cater to the geek crowd right now since they don't release binaries, you have to understand CVS and keep up to date, and the best GUI is curses-based. That means you'll find more anime than Brittany Speers, but it's quick, reliable, and works great on Linux. (not affiliated, just a happy user :)
      • Unfortunately, giFT does not work on BSD last time I checked. To me, this is the major show stopper. Project FastTrack is well-funded but I doubt they will make any progress. I suspect that there is a code execution backdoor intentionally installed within all FT servents (this is how Morpheus got booted off FastTrack), aka an auto-update feature--and one who controls the FT protocol may be able to control the entire userbase of the FT network. A cracker could own millions of machines without any hacking required. Of course, Sharman might have used public-key cryptopgraphy, but who knows...
        • Hmm... just a brief browsing of the docs suggests it works on *nix systems, which in theory includes BSD, and it is known to work on Mac OS X. I agree that there's probably some way Brilliant retains control over the network without requiring every client to download a new version -- if I was a scumball spyware-peddling P2P app creator, I'd include some kind of back door. Any script kiddie that finds it could have some fun.
        • well i doubt kazaa has a back door, you would think the people at kazaa lite would have found it by now ( k-lite.tk [k-lite.tk] ), i would venture to guess they just slightly modify the FT protocol so that older versions of kazaa or other FT clients wont work anymore... possibly speficaly excluding clients that identify themselves as one sharman wants to boot from the network. as soon as all the supernodes upgrade to the new version. bam! booted off the network. any other ideas? (atleast hopefully sharman isnt dumb enough to include a backdoor in public software!)
          • Yes, the supernodes send out upgrade notices. Spoof this upgrade notice, and you may be able to execute arbitrary code on 4,464,221 hosts. Kazaa 1.5 booted Morpheus off the network because of its updateable key/hash algorithm for supernode authentication. Users of outdated clients receive a dialog, asking them to upgrade; clicking yes automatically downloads the software. Kazaa Lite is a nice piece of software, but you shouldn't give the authors too much credit. They didn't reverse-engineer the FT protocol. Resource hacking and in-process manipulation is the jist of KL. (Because of the way Win32 works, its pretty easy to manipulate certain windows, and write programs such as SpeedUp and Kazap). The real crackers haven't spent any time on Kazaa, as far as I know.
            • i didnt suspect they fully reversed engeneered it, but if there is a back door in it, you think they would have noticed it? someone should reenigne-esrever the FT protocol and make a modern linux client. Thanks for the insight!

  • an even more daring prediction (Score:5, Insightful)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:05PM (#5437225)
    No matter what happens, these people can claim victory. I mean, P2P basically could be anything where one machine sometimes acts as a client and sometimes as a server. You know, like workstations used to before the advent of dial-up Internet access, when people started needing servers because they weren't always on or their IP addresses kept changing. And for grid computing, well, machines sometimes need to act as clients and sometimes as servers.

    Here, I'll go out on a limb and make an even more daring prediction: grid computing will use Rendezvous-like services. Some of the machines may do that at boot time, to load customized and specialized machine configuration (you know, like BOOTP/DHCP followed by NFS), and others will use it at the application level to discover potential clients and servers.

    All this stuff was designed into the Internet in decades ago. People are just giving fancy names to very traditional usages of sockets, servers, and broadcast packets. "Grid computing", too, is pretty much what people have been doing on networks of workstations for years: sometimes you push the jobs, sometimes available machines pull the jobs, sometimes you have a workflow manager, sometimes it's done through NFS, etc.

    All of this reminds me of some teenager thinking that they are the first person on the planet to have discovered "sex".

  • I got rid of my old GRID computer years ago. The plasma screen was kind of cool, but the bubble memory was s-l-o-w.

  • I predict. (Score:5, Funny)

    by dameron ( 307970 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:25PM (#5437309)
    As these two technologies converge you'll start seeing white vans driving around residential neighborhoods with carefully hidden antennas sprouting from the top, snopping, like antiquated British tv detectors, for illegal activity on the grids.

    Not long after that, the "virtual search warrant" and mandated backdoors in commercial grid products will appear.

    Those fucks (**AA) would try to regulate telepathy if it existed.

    -dameron
    • regulating telepathy . . . hmmm, get simmons in here.

      considering we pay for bottled water . . .

      also the old MS joke that congressman made about charging for the alphabet and then charging an extra $40 (or whatever) if i decide to add letters such as N, or T

      sorry, not that relevant, or funny

    • Those fucks (**AA) would try to regulate telepathy if it existed.
      I realize the parent was using the asterisk as a wildcard, but as I was scrolled through the comments, it first appeared that he was willing to say 'fucks' but censored himself when referencing the RIAA, and the MPAA.
      Good ol' unintentional comedy.

  • DC++ (Score:4, Interesting)

    by caluml ( 551744 ) <slashdot@spamgoe ... minus herbivore> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:31PM (#5437341) Homepage
    All my OS-disabled Windows using chums are banging on about an open source P2P app called DC++ [sourceforge.net].

    It's open source, and all, but there isn't a Linux client [sourceforge.net]. Any l33t coders out there that are bored should look at bringing this to the land of Linux.

    And yes, I understand the irony of calling them OS-disabled, and in the same breath complaining that my OS of choice doesn't have the same facility.

    • Re:DC++ (Score:2, Interesting)

      by OuD ( 527033 )
      Have you checked out dcgui [ketelhot.de]?

      Don't know if this one is DC++ or just plain DC (what's the difference between them anyway?), but it has nice features like multi-hub search, and I've used it successfully.

      I just feel the problem with DC is that there doesn't seem to be any way to resume broken downloads from other sources automatically (or maybe it's just this client).

      • "DC", unqualified, is the original software from Neo-Modus [neo-modus.com] (the creators of DirectConnect). DC++ [sourceforge.net] is an open-source implementation of the DirectConnect protocol. They all use the same protocol. DC doesn't support resuming of broken downloads from other sources automatically, but you can resume manually.
      • DC++ differs from DC by having, among other things connections to multiple hubs simultaneously.

        dcgui offers the same functionality as DC++, with a few extras like download from multiple sources and upload speed throttling.

        Since a large percentage of hub ops seems to be ignorant bastards who don't know how to read a dc client signature, these features have sadly led to dcgui being banned on many hubs. Of course, if the hub doesn't read the client signature at all, one can always turn off dcgui's signature and connect anyway, and hope that the ops don't stick their noses in your client.

    • Re:DC++ (Score:1, Offtopic)

      by g4dget ( 579145 )
      Linux doesn't need such an application because it is such an application: FTP, Apache, DAV, talk, etc. are all peer-to-peer, direct-conect applications for file sharing and messaging. You can plug in new services, connect them, etc., all easily and robustly.

  • Harumph (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SlowMovingTarget ( 550823 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @08:36PM (#5437361) Homepage

    In the future:

    Computers will control our houses and your high definition television will be your main terminal

    Someone will make a mobile phone that doesn't suck as a PDA (or a PDA that doesn't suck as mobile phone)

    We'll all evolve more agile thumbs from "texting"

    There will be One True programming language (not a troll)

    Everyone will type on a Dvorak keyboard when not using a flawless voice interface that does what you mean and not what you say

    We will bathe everyone in the electromagnetic glory of Wireless

    As computers get faster and faster, and software gets more and more efficient, every user interaction will receive nearly instantaneous responses

    VR is the next big thing

    Build from a solid foundation and some of things will happen. Build from fragile abstractions and a sneeze will knock out the grid. The promise of technology is not the promise of earnings or market creation. How well does it help us live our lives.

    Flush toilet, books == good

    Pager, way-too-fast-food == bad

    ...Crawls back in cave...

  • If they do converge... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spytap ( 143526 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @09:10PM (#5437495)
    It'll be so amazing and cool that everyone will want to have it, so people will begin selling it. They will, however, quickly go out of business because the product they are trying to sell is available for free download on the product they have already sold ;)

  • Either illegal or pointless (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @10:32PM (#5437915) Homepage
    The whole "peer to peer" network thing exists solely to evade copyright. If it wasn't for that, music would just go out on USENET, which is far more efficient. Each new item would traverse each link no more than once, and usually less. Less-used stuff would be downloaded from web servers. How many new mainstream songs come out every day, after all?

    As for "grid computing", if there was a real need for it, people who needed it would be buying up off-peak time on server farms. That's not happening.

    Both ideas are promoted by people desperately seeking a revenue stream, rather than trying to provide a new capability. Unless they figure out some way to put a boot on the consumer's throat and make him pay, it's not going to happen.

  • Even in this paper, the definitions of P2P and Grid computing seem to be hopelesly ambiguous. I've always assumed that grid computing fell under the definition of P2P. Isn't grid computing and distributed computing the same thing? From the oreilly P2P book, I remember distributing computing, file sharing, instant messaging and web services were defined as P2P applications.

    Even the definition of grid computing in this paper, is the same as distributed computing using a hybrid centralized+decentralized P2P topology.

  • "Invitation Only" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@nOspam.ivoss.com> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @10:54PM (#5438004) Homepage Journal
    I love how the IPTPS is invitation only [berkeley.edu], considering that most of the hackers who made P2P technologies as popular as they are today, wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell in getting an invitation before they released. The concept of an invitation only P2P conference goes against all the ideas which ignited P2P development in the first place.

  • duh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lightray ( 215185 ) <tobin@splorg.org> on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:18PM (#5438119) Homepage
    Convergence of P2P and Grid?? Well, DUH. They're basically two names for the same thing. Almost.

    I hope to see some of plan 9 [bell-labs.com] in "the grid". Need another CPU? Mount it into the filesystem...

  • Predicted?!?! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sarcazmo ( 555312 ) on Tuesday March 04, 2003 @11:40PM (#5438204)
    Come on! All recent Windows P2P software has come with distributed grid computing applications to collect marketing data. They are way behind the times here.
    • i think your missing the point. the grid applications that come bundled with the p2p software run indepedently, what the point is is a p2p grid, a grid that everyone can be a part of and use with equal rights.
  • Amazing how this artical comes directly after the announcement of the PS2 Grid networking initiative [yahoo.com], but just can't come right out and say anything about it.

  • Sony and IBM are throwing a lot of attention towards butterfly.net [butterfly.net].

    It's a small company in WV, but with some interesting applications for grid computing with massively parallel games.

  • "Scooped, Again" says it better (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rewrkng ( 655284 ) on Wednesday March 05, 2003 @02:46AM (#5438910) Homepage
    Another paper at the same Berkeley conference, Scooped, Again [berkeley.edu] by four Harvard researchers, has much more to say about the overlapping set of problems being tackled by the P2P and Grid research communities.

    The paper's title refers to the Web having been implemented by those outside the systems research community, who had elegant solutions to interesting problems but didn't pay enough attention to needs of users. The authors are afraid this might happen again if P2P researchers ignore the needs of Grid users. The third generation P2P infrastructures represented by systems such as Tapestry, Pastry, and Chord are amazing. For example, with one of these, you could implement a truly distributed DNS system that doesn't use hierarchy or centralization, and thus would be much more immune to DoS attacks than the current system. P2P researchers should heed the Call to Action at the end of this paper.

  • im not saying that grids and p2p will not merge, infact i think it will happen, im posting because i see another possibility that hasent been discussed yet. is it possible that programmers of grids will incorperats *some* p2p ideas but not all? still maintaining a hiarchey system on some level? and isnt it possible that p2p programmers will take a hint from grid programmers, and incorperate *some* ideas from grids into their software, but still being independent of a grid?... just a thought...

  • P2P Melded with NAT, is this a litigation proof model for P2P?

    I having been thinking about the RIAA and MPAA hiring organizations to monitoring people's file sharing activities and then using that information to prosecute individuals. The recent Verizon case comes to mind http://www.eff.org/Cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/20030121_p r.php [eff.org] . I propose a new P2P technology that mixes P2P and NAT technologies. Each client spends half of it's bandwidth on sharing it's own files, the other half on NATing other people's files. Direct connections to download a file are never permitted, all downloads must bounce through at least one NAT hop, and the clients never respond back to a search request with the location of the file, only that they know where to get the file from and the bandwidth that they can deliver the file at.

    In this type of system, which I'm sure can easily be designed and implemented, are the relaying PC's liable for the files they transmit, or do they fall under a "safe harbor" ISP type provision? Or is all this pointless and we should just push Congress for the type of "media tax" that is now placed on blank CD-Rs, tapes, etc to be applied to consumer bandwidth in exchange for a truce with the RIAA, MPAA, etc?

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