Together with Arvind Krishnamurthy, I’ll be chairing this year’s International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS). The workshop was started in 2002, which coincided both with the popularization of P2P file sharing (Napster, KaZaA) and the introduction of distributed hash tables (DHTs) from several different research groups.
Eight years later, P2P file sharing is still going strong (now through BitTorrent), while the previously-academic DHTs have found their way into real use. DHTs now form the decentralized lookup structures for file sharing services—in the form of so-called “trackerless” BitTorrent—with the DHT in the Vuze service comprising more than a million concurrent users. (As an aside, I’m proud to note that Vuze’s DHT is based on Kademlia, which was proposed by one of my officemates in grad school, Petar Maymounkov.)
These self-organizing systems have also found their way into the datacenter. One notable example is the storage system, Dynamo, that forms the basis for Amazon’s shopping cart and other back-end applications. Or Facebook’s Cassandra, used for its Inbox search. Or the rest of the key-value stores that do automated partitioning. And we are starting to see these techniques being proposed for scaling enterprise networks as well. With that in mind, we wanted to broaden the scope of this year’s IPTPS to include topics relating to self-organizing and self-managing distributed systems, even those running in single administrative domains.
We also plan to have a demo session at this year’s IPTPS to highlight developed and deployed systems. The workshop will be collocated with NSDI in San Jose, so will be especially convenient for those in the Bay Area. We welcome submissions (both paper and demos) from researchers, developers, and hackers. If you don’t want to write a paper, come show off your running P2P system.
Paper submissions are due Friday, December 18, 2009. More information can be found at http://www.usenix.org/event/iptps10/cfp/.
Continue Reading
