2023–24 Projects:
Advisor: Amy Csizmar Dalal
Meeting time: TTh 3:10-4:55
If you're like millions of other people, chances are you've used Kazaa, LimeWire, or a similar application to download music or find that episode of South Park that you missed. But peer-to-peer networking, the technology that allows you to do this, is much more than an enabler for the world's biggest jukebox. Increasingly, peer-to-peer networking plays a major role in scientific and mathematical research.
For instance, SETI@home is a popular program that utilizes the PCs of millions of users to analyze radio signals for signs of extraterrestrial life. Distributed.net, a similar project, utilizes peer-to-peer networking in various difficult mathematical tasks, such as the RSA Data Security Challenge. Peer-to-peer computing has also been applied to research problems like the simulation of protein folding, the development of new AIDS drugs, and the real-time detection of "bottlenecks" in the Internet.
Peer-to-peer networking technologies are also used in ad-hoc sensor networks. These networks are typically composed of small electronic devices that monitor some aspect of their surroundings and report this data to some other device. Sensor networks are used to monitor indoor climate conditions in server farms, detect levels of dangerous chemicals from battlefields, and so on.
Peer-to-peer networking is certainly changing the way we think about both computer networking and about large-scale computing tasks. This project considers these two areas in more detail.
In this project, you'll be designing and building a peer-to-peer network for the purpose of performing some large-scale computing task. Your tasks will include:
In addition, you will be dealing with issues of scalability, (de)centralization of control, and parallelization of tasks.
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E. Adar and B. Huberman. "Free riding on Gnutella." First Monday, vol. 5, no. 10, October 2000.
M. Ripeanu et al. "Mapping the Gnutella network: Properties of large-scale peer-to-peer systems and implications for system design." IEEE Internet Computing Journal special issue on peer-to-peer networking, vol. 6, no. 1, 2002.
N. Leibowitz, M. Ripeanu, A. Wierzbicki. "Deconstructing the Kazaa Network." Proceedings of the Third IEEE Workshop on Internet Applications, San Jose, CA, June 2003.
P. Karbhari et al. "Bootstrapping in Gnutella: A Measurement Study." Proceedings of the Passive and Active Measurements, Antibes Juan-les-Pins, France, April 2004