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Better Than Bit Torrent, For Internet2 Users? 176

Posted by timothy from the we-had-one-atom-to-share-and-liked-it dept.
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."
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Better Than Bit Torrent, For Internet2 Users? More

Better Than Bit Torrent, For Internet2 Users?

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  • Internet 2 ?? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:31PM (#7507094)
    Is there pr0n on this so called internet 2?

  • I've never had much luck with BT (Score:4, Funny)

    by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:32PM (#7507100) Homepage
    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.

  • P2P is NOT Going Anywhere (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Preach the Good Word ( 723957 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:33PM (#7507108)
    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.
    • What does this have to do with the topic and Internet2? Since neither are used by the common person (they are used between Universities doing research), your comments (which are far from insightful, even if on-topic) don't address a single thing in this news story.
      • Yeah, I remember during my freshman year in the dorm I'd do "research" in a divx trading irc channel just for internt2 .edu connections (heh, a script would only give you +v if you had .edu in your host).

        I guess research was the original intent, but obviously not the only use.
        • that's faulty. not every .edu is on the internet2, and not every .edu in the internet2 has i2 connection across all facilities.

          my college didn't have an i2 connection until my sophomore year (that was nice when the rtsr underworld ftp archive was hosted by my buddy at NYU, ZOOOOOOM) and even now the dorms have been taken off.

    • Re:P2P is NOT Going Anywhere (Score:4, Informative)

      by xenocide2 ( 231786 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:13PM (#7507383) Homepage
      And you know what? That didn't stop my university from blocking all packets over the bittorrent protocol! Bastards.
      • Same here. Since I live off-campus, the only I ever bothered using it for was ISO downloads (too much trouble sneakernet other stuff).

        Damned dorm-rats.

        I really hope this does take off and is a good replacement for BT AND the campus admins don't block the ports on it like they did for BT.

  • BitTorrent is too ad-hoc (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Space cowboy ( 13680 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:33PM (#7507109) Journal
    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.

    • Re:BitTorrent is too ad-hoc (Score:5, Insightful)

      by koreth ( 409849 ) * on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:47PM (#7507224)
      people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle

      Generally it's a good idea to run a seed for your files if you're running a tracker. That way everyone will always have at least one source for the file -- i.e., you fall back to roughly the download performance level you'd have without BitTorrent, with people downloading from your server.

      If you just run a tracker and don't provide an always-on source for the actual underlying files, then yeah, BitTorrent will pretty much suck for infrequently-accessed files.

    • I thought ad-hoc was a good thing. Sure, businesses who want things to be simple and predictable might consider ad-hoc to be unworkable, but there's heaps of "little people" out there without big budgets that benefit from co-operative networks that can be assembled as needed by everyone pitching in their bit.

    • Re:BitTorrent is too ad-hoc (Score:4, Insightful)

      by yerricde ( 125198 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:54PM (#7507269) Homepage Journal

      people turn their machine off, and you're stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle

      As long as the first publisher of the file leaves a BT window open, nobody is "stuck waiting for a chunk in the middle."

    • Re:BitTorrent is too ad-hoc (Score:5, Informative)

      by halr9000 ( 465474 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @09:15PM (#7507724) Homepage

      If you think bittorrent is too adhoc, you've never been to 3dgamers [3dgamers.com]. For every game demo or movie they provide information about, they provide a bittorrent seed. In addition, they do provide direct download mirrors, but I don't even bother anymore.

      Another tip: The official bittorrent client isn't that great. You should try Azureus [sourceforge.net]. It's written in Java, which sucks (flame me, I bite back), but even so I love it. In fact it might be the only java program that I like now that I think about it.

      • It's written in Java, which sucks (flame me, I bite back), but even so I love it. In fact it might be the only java program that I like now that I think about it.

        I WANT to flame you, but I agree with you!

        Signed,
        Gripped by Indecision

      • What I am trying to do is to get the author of Downloader for X [krasu.ru] to include BT protocol in his program. As his program already supports HTTP, FTP (with file splitting for multithreaded downloads), scheduling, inter-process communication (X drag-n-drop) and has a decent GUI, if he would add BT it would be just about perfect.

        Go to his site, take a look, and perhaps drop him a line on his forums asking for BT - maybe if he gets /.ed he may just do it.

    • How about FreeCache [archive.org], from the Internet Archive folks? They have a good presentation about how it differs from BitTorrent and it addresses the ad hoc-ness of BT.

  • Dear Santa (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:34PM (#7507118)
    Please put me on Internet2. Internet1 is old and busted. I've seen all the pr0n, downloaded all the songs, and I'm tired of getting viagra penis spam 418 times a day.

    I'll be a good boy next year, you can believe it.

    Thanks in advance,
    Johnny

  • fish is to apple as... (Score:5, Informative)

    by glassesmonkey ( 684291 ) * on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:36PM (#7507126) Homepage Journal
    What a HORRIBLE description this is to compare with BT!!
    From this [utk.edu] 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!
    The LoRS tools give you read/write access to the unused storage space on the L-Bone. The L-Bone is a collection of IBP depots spread across the globe. The distribution of Linux using this infrastructure is to us an experiment, and to you, the chance to get your ISO in about 5-10 minutes. Our intention is to upload multiple copies of the ISOs into the L-Bone using the lors_upload tool. These copies will be geographically dispersed and broken in to smaller pieces. Once the copies are uploaded, the tool generates the exNode pseudo-file. These exNodes will be available from this page for download with names like [distribution_name].iso.xnd.
    ...
    After installing these tools, you can upload your own files to the L-Bone and then send the exNode to others who would be interested in having a copy of the file. During the upload process you can determine how long your uploads reside in the L-Bone and even which depots to use based on locality/proximity (like ZIP codes). The depots themselves also determine how long an allocation is allowed to exist. After the allocation time (user or depot determined) expires, the data is erased from the L-Bone.

    Also, a Director for this stuff hints at it being a fee-based in the future. (More documentation here [utk.edu])
    "Well . . . It's new! It's cool! It solves a big need! It's free (for now)! And it has a good instruction manual. Woo-hoo! I'll take Joe's opinion that you don't even have to be "a minor league geek" to play around with this new stuff with the proverbial grain of salt, but I'll bet quite a few of you will be "LoRSing around" with it soon."
    -- Terry Calhoun is director of communications and publications for the Society for College and University Planning (www.scup.org)

    • It looks more like Freenet or (the defunct) MojoNation to me, except without the constraints imposed by an anonymity guarantee.

    • Yup, it's shared FTP space really.

      Not a thing to do with BT.

      Most importantly, it's NEW :)
    • What a HORRIBLE description this is to compare with BT!!
      *shrug* The technologies have different end users in mind, but both are interesting to the same kind of geeks.

      Most researchers are probably not interested in BitTorrent since their transfer rates will not be imporved by BitTorrent's model (There's likely only one or two downloads going simultaneously for research data, since the audience isn't large)

      The LoRS tools give you read/write.... [full text truncated]
      You highlighted a few phrases from the

  • Oh please (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sanity ( 1431 ) * on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:39PM (#7507151) Homepage Journal
    This sounds like Akamai, you still need to pay for server bandwidth - it isn't competitive with P2P content delivery networks like BT.

    Oh, and as soon as Freenet gets N.G Routing [freenetproject.org] working nicely, BitTorrent will be obsolete [/flamebait] ;-)

    • Re:Oh please [OT] (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Magila ( 138485 )
      Sure it'd be great if Freenet was working nicly, but that's a big if. It's been in development for more than 3 years now and they're still not even close to having a network that's ready for use by the masses. I'm not sure it'll ever get to that point either. One of the golden rules of P2P is that bandwidth is precious, yet Freenet merily uses n times the amount of data being moved in bandwidth passing that data up a chain of nodes to preserve anonimity. This is probably going to forever relagate Freen

      • Re:Oh please [OT] (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Feztaa ( 633745 )
        Freenet merily uses n times the amount of data being moved in bandwidth passing that data up a chain of nodes to preserve anonimity.

        That's the whole point of Freenet! It's not designed to be the easiest way to get the latest DVD rips, it's designed to be a way to communicate 100% anonymously, for example if you're living in a repressive regime, and you need to send a message without getting killed.

        • Re:Oh please [OT] (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Magila ( 138485 )
          Yes, if you absolutly positivly need to be anonymous Freenet is the way to go. But the parent was talking about Freenet making Bittorrent obsolete, which is never going to happen because Freenet has to sacrifice too much efficency to maintain anonimity.
        • I would wager that the lines that anyone uses in a 'repressed' country are already tapped.
    • Oh, and as soon as Freenet gets N.G Routing working nicely, BitTorrent will be obsolete [/flamebait] ;-)

      Will it run on GNU/Hurd when it comes out?
    • I know it was a joke, but last I checked, infrequently referenced files fall off Freenet. BitTorrent allows people to champion files that may not be popular now, but later on become wildly so (or even just mildly so). To a certain extent, I think they're both targetted at fundamentally different purposes, with some overlap.
  • Yet Another PHP Nuke-alike (YAPNA). This time from a university! Somehow I expected better. Ah well, looks like their MySQL is down anyway.

  • I wouldn't say 'better' exactly, just different (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RalphBNumbers ( 655475 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:42PM (#7507182)
    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.

  • Give it up for the coward! (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @07:55PM (#7507277)
    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
  • They've got the cash,
    But we've got the numbers.
  • This sounds a bit similair to drftpd, Distributed FTP Daemon [drftpd.mog.se]. Although drftpd does not stripe data at the protocol level, you can use some kind of splitting tool such as RAR with multiple archives to stripe data across nodes. I'd implement striping at protocol level but that would break site-to-site FTP transfers and would require improved protocol and FTP clients. GridFTP might be better for it anyway.

  • What if a node goes down? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by menscher ( 597856 ) <[menscher+slashdot] [at] [uiuc.edu]> on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:00PM (#7507309) Homepage Journal
    Bittorrent works well, because it doesn't matter if one of your peers dies. There are lots of others. (When I downloaded the Fedora ISOs, for example, there were hundreds of peers.)

    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....

    • And what about when the last seed dies? The problem with BT is you can only get stuff that is popular and current - there will nearly always be a bunch of people that only manage to get half the file and never be able to get the rest.

      It mostly works for the moment, because people leave their torrents open while they download through the night, so the upload/download ratio becomes almost even (required for the economics of a p2p infrastructure to work).

      Once clients get developed which stop sharing once a t
      • Anybody who wants to publish something reliably just needs to put up a seed and keep it up. If they want to publish something _more_ reliably, they can put up two seeds in different places to decrease the chance of failure, plus if they're distributing something with worldwide popularity, it helps to put seeds on several continents. if a given file becomes less popular, on a server which also has material that's more popular, the possible download rates obviously go way down, but there's no reason for so


      • Pleaze mod parent
        +100 Insightful
    • LoCI deals with this by having multiple copies of the data spread around (mirroring in your RAID analogy). So if one site goes down, no data will be lost. For instance, "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."

  • You think that's cool? (Score:4, Funny)

    by DroopyStonx ( 683090 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:01PM (#7507313)
    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.

  • As a LoRS User (Score:2, Informative)

    by barureddy ( 314276 )
    This is like bit torrent, but not any way close to the redundancy of users. Right now there are only a few servers that host a file. There isn't a need for much more because A. the network doesn't have that many people B. there is so much bandwidth. There is no organized p2p warez network setup. It is in the experimental phase and only used now for research applications.

    As stated in previous posts, Internet2 is only accessible by academic institutions and corporations. I'm just a student at a university th

  • mod_torrent is the way to solve this (Score:5, Interesting)

    by belphegore ( 66832 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:15PM (#7507396)
    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 [sf.net] 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.
    • This is cool, especially since the Internet is such a large community, you have a higher number of peers (as compared to Internet2).

      I think it would be just as legitimate to have an Apache module based on Logistical Networking. Maybe a mesh of both aspects, fixed plus peer to peer, could prove beneficial.

      Until then, I think bittorrent-fueled downloads from web servers will be very cool.

      • Re:mod_torrent is the way to solve this (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It's not clear to me how this would actually work
        for a real Site, since you'd either need a Plugin
        for you browser or at least BitTorrent installed.

        Also, this would greatly increase loading
        times on your website ( granted - a fully-loaded
        webserver won't be doing any better ) especially
        when using lots of graphics as each of them
        needs to be downloaded from a P2P network.
        As you might know, latency is rather bad on
        P2P.
        Overall, I don't think this would be a huge
        advancement, as for now, its just not suited for
        that

        • Re:mod_torrent is the way to solve this - MOD UP! (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          imo all three posters are correct; mixing bt into apache should allow a simple process for sharing a number of files (ideally just dropping them into a dir & running some indexer?), whereas one would otherwise need a running bt (seeder) for each shared file (other solutions?) all the time.
          seems to be good for 0day stuff and rare files alike.
          though making a browser render a page out of a bt tmp-download dir might be possible, surfing exp would probably be nowhere near 'fast'.
        • The idea would likely be to have the plugin only kick in for either certain mime types, or content above a certain size, at least for today. Yes, currently you need to have a bittorrent client installed, or integrated into your browser, but the content is at least available in a slashdot-like situation. I agree that it's likely HTML or small image files will never usefully be conveyed by this mechanism, but larger files, or any content that's rendered inline in a page would benefit.
        • Many sites already require you to use their own download manager applications if you want to download anything large, so requiring BitTorrent isn't so dramatic these days. But what if, instead of every site developing Yet Another Download Manager, they instead brandend their own versions of the BitTorrent client. The clients would be interchangable and the sites wouldn't have to maintain their own programs (I'm sure they've got better things to do).

          Using BitTorrent for large files you need to serve seems a

  • Aww, how nice. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anenga ( 529854 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:18PM (#7507413)
    New technology for doing mulitsource/multithread downloads of ISOs is making Linux users on Internet2 happy.

    Aww, good for those Internet2 users. All 15 of them.
  • A story about Internet2 networking technology kills Internet1 web server in minutes flat.
  • Because I2 wasn't fast enough requiring that everyone on it be in relative proximity to a gigapop.

  • Freshmeat home page. (Score:3, Informative)

    by infolib ( 618234 ) on Tuesday November 18, 2003 @08:56PM (#7507618)
    LoRS Tools are on Freshmeat [freshmeat.net]
    The download link [freshmeat.net] works ok - it seems the slashdotting has merely taken out dynamic HTML generation, not the bandwidth.

    Apparently it's under a BSD License - IMHO quite suitable for a publicly funded project. (Flamewar ensues...)
  • here [fys.ku.dk] (temporarily)

    Bandwidth sponsored by danish research funding.
  • I'm glad to see the LoCI guys getting some recognition. I've been using their tools for quite some time and they are useful well beyond downloading ISOs. Data movement is an important issue, especially in distributed environments, such as the Internet and grids. The packages that LoCI has released are a very strong solution to the data movement problem.
  • I'm at a university (Columbia) which is connected to Internet2. It automatically routes (as far as I know) across Internet2 when appropriate, which means to students at the other schools on Internet2. And we all know who P2P's biggest users are... so I've been using BT nonstop to great effect here. Also, Columbia's idiotic bandwidth policies (can't upload >100MB/hr or they administratively sever your ethernet port) don't apply to data across Internet2. So I usually don't get in trouble letting the up
  • What's internet2 ???
    • Internet2 is a research network for developing and testing new protocols/applications/technologies related to networking. It consists primarily of universities and other research facilities, but there are several companies (like mine [comotivsystems.com]) that are also participating in it.

      There are much higher hardware standards for the routing equipment and overall Internet2 is currently operating at around 100x the speed of the "conventional" internet. (My company has a video and audio collaboration package that just rocks
  • anyone got a torrent for internet2? ;P
  • Has anyone checked this out? http://www.two-degrees.com I tried it on a download yesterday of 50 megs and 1 second after starting up I was connected to 7 hosts at full download speed. Torrents have never done that for me ever no matter what network I was downloading from.

    Sadly it has no linux version.


  • Not trying to be as big of a smartass as I normally am, I'd like to point out that we've got basically this L-bone thing going on right now. It's called Usenet.
  • BitTorrent is quite nice, though I found that sharing files with it isn't quite easy, since you need to seed the file yourself if no one else has it yet. So if you are keeping up a thousand downloads on your website for example, you'd need to run a thousand bittorent seeds for those.

    It would be nice if the bittorrent tracker file could have a regular http or ftp link in it, from which the BT client would start downloading the file in case no seeds are found. I think that would make it alot easier to use fo

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