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TDS Seminar TDS Seminar TDS Seminar TDS Seminar TDS Seminar TDS Seminar
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Title:   Analysis of the Evolution of Peer-to-Peer Systems
Speaker: David Liben-Nowell

Place:   NE43-308
Time:    1-2:30pm
Date:    May 10, 2002

Abstract:

Peer-to-peer systems are distributed systems in which nodes join and leave
the system frequently (and often unexpectedly).  Chord is a recently
designed peer-to-peer system that has been shown to have a number of good
properties, including good (probabilistic) fault tolerance, efficient
lookup, etc.  However, this previous analysis has focused on an ideal state
of Chord that, as nodes join and fail, will rarely (if ever) be achieved.

In this talk, I will present an evolutionary analysis of the way Chord
behaves as nodes come and go.  Chord periodically runs a maintenance
protocol to recover from node joins and failures, and I will show that the
good properties of the ideal state continue to hold as long as the rate of
change of the system is reasonably small compared to the rate of
maintenance.

Joint work with Hari Balakrishnan and David Karger.

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For more info on the schedule of the TDS seminars and the particular
paper being presented each week (abstract/postscript), please refer to
the TDS seminar webpage:

http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/tds/tds-seminars.html

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