Researcher Anne-Marie Kermarrec visits LSD and teaches a research seminar on P2P systems

Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have recently been subject to significant advances both in the academic and in the industrial areas, in response to the outstanding increase of the scale of today's distributed systems with respect to the volume of handled information, the system size, but also the geographical dispersion of the participants. P2P systems are characterized by a strong potential scalability, often achieved by eliminating any form of centralization. They provide a sound basis to build a wide spectrum of distributed
applications: file sharing systems, mechanisms for contents multicast, applications based on the publish/subscribe paradigm, or desktop grid applications.
The goal of this course is to describe approaches to build and maintain peer to peer infrastructures and describe their attractive properties: scalability, self-organization in dynamic environments and a significant fault tolerance. All along, we will focus on a number of distributed applications implemented on top of such infrastructures. We will specifically consider structured p2p infrastructures and gossip-based protocols in this context.