Aaron Darling <darling at cs.wisc.edu> wrote: >Anyways, my point is that it would be great if NCBI would set up a bittorent server themselves, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for their leadership on the issue. > People interested in high-performance file transfer might check out multicast data distribution tools from Micah Beck's "Logistical Computing and Internetworking Lab" http://loci.cs.utk.edu/ <http://loci.cs.utk.edu/projects/index.php> Collectively they call it a "Logistical Distribution Network" (LoDN - "lowdown"). I've seen demos at Internet2 and Supercomputing meetings (mainly, like BitTorrent, for sucking down huge digital video files) and it's quite impressive. Data streams from multiple storage sites ("depots") simultaneously, aggregated and presented to the client as a single "exNode" ... basically it treats high-speed internet connections as a virtual backplane using a specialized protocol/middleware. There is no single point-of-failure and no one site has to bear the entire burden of providing data resources. It's sort of the same mentality as the LOCKSS project in the digital library/archival community -- "Lots Of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe" -- except oriented towards highly dynamic rather than archival data, so for instance there are mechanisms to keep data current. And unlike bittorrent and other p2p content sharing services, control is retained over data stored on depots. Whether it would work well for our purposes or NIH/NCBI would even go for something like this is uncertain, but the NSF and US Dept. of Energy have been interested enough to fund it for several years. -- Lee Watkins, Jr. Director of Bioinformatics Center for Inherited Disease Research (CIDR) Institute of Genetic Medicine Johns Hopkins Bayview Research Campus 333 Cassell Drive, Triad Bldg. Suite 2000 Baltimore, MD 21224 lwatkins at jhu.edu | www.cidr.jhmi.edu 410-550-7042 ofc | 410-903-2989 cell -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://bioinformatics.org/pipermail/bioclusters/attachments/20060202/e011e0ff/attachment.html