Peer-to-Peer Computing >> Meeting the P2P Challenge

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Peer-to-Peer Computing >> Meeting the P2P Challenge

1/31/2005

By Matt Villano

Every semester brings new technological challenges to the staff at the University of Florida, and September 2003 was no different from the norm. Students flocked to campus after a summer of freedom, wielding the peer-to-peer (P2P) applications Kazaa, Cheetah, Grokster, and a variety of others. Building on the technology behind the infamous (and moribund) Napster file-sharing application, these alternatives allowed students to share music files, movies, and other digitized content with their compatriots both on campus and off. To do so, they only had to set up their computers to download lists of files, rev up their programs, and head out to class while their machines handled the dirty work.

At the time, UF officials admitted that nearly 90 percent of the school’s outbound bandwidth was being used for P2P. Adding insult to injury, the same officials received 40 notices of copyright violations each month, and reported that in any average 24-hour period, 3,500 of the 7,500 students in residence halls were using P2P services. To put these figures into more straightforward terms, although the campus network had been designed to enhance the educational process, in the end it was serving mostly as a conduit for the latest Modest Mouse songs and Paris Hilton videos. Looking back, Robert Bird, coordinator of Network Services for the school’s Department of Housing, says that peer-to-peer technology basically ground network performance to a standstill.

“To say the problem was rampant would have been the understatement of the century,” he quips. “Even after Napster, we were up to our eyeballs in P2P, and no matter what we did to try to minimize the problems, they just wouldn’t go away.”

UF is not the only school to fall victim to P2P; across the country, at academic institutions large and small, technologists are grappling with ways to fight the evolving challenges of peer-to-peer. While many of these file-sharing applications crimp network bandwidth, they also present huge problems for copyright evangelists at organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA; www.riaa.com), who complain that sharing files without paying for them is illegal. These problems certainly aren’t confined to academia. A recent survey by the Internet research firm IT Innovations & Concepts (ITIC; www.itic.ca) indicates that 81 million Internet users worldwide engage in some form of P2P file sharing. Furthermore, says the study, in 2003, the US downloaded more digital songs (4.4 billion) than any other nation on the planet—an ignominious distinction, to say the least.

Help, however, is on the way. New technologies from a variety of network management vendors have enabled schools to take a proactive approach toward shaping network traffic and restricting the amount of it available for file sharing at any given time. At UF, where P2P once crippled the network daily, technologists have refused to restrict Internet use, but have built a system that monitors illicit P2P activity and responds accordingly (details on this in “Clipping their Wings,” below). And at Pennsylvania State University, IT officials are spearheading an open source movement to create the mother of all P2P networks, a new approach that combines decentralized file sharing with identity management, in a strategy that could completely revolutionize computing.