This is interesting. It also makes sense. Developers for Microsoft in the UK have been working on a new P2P app designed much like BitTorrent. Redmond recognized that aside from pirating, the BitTorrent model of distributed filesharing is revolutionary, in that it has a potential for the efficient sharing of very large files, such as the upcoming Longhorn OS.
However, BitTorrent has a weakness in that the last few bits of a large file can be problematic. This is because there are not many at first and maybe those few that have the final pieces are unavailable. This creates a bottleneck that the UK developers think they have solved.
Avalanche does not depend on central servers to track the download, as BitTorrent does. In beta testing, Avalanche distributed a 4GB file in a day to several thousand of its software beta testers, according to InfoWorld. |
According to a spokesman at a recent open house in Cambridge, Avalanche includes strong security ensuring content providers that unauthorized parties will not be able to offer content for download. In addition, while Avalanche is similar to BitTorrent, it is based on a different system and according to a recently released research paper, it is some 20% more efficient. Unfortunately, from what can be read around the Internet, Microsoft at this point anyway has no intention of releasing this product to the public. But, this is not to say we wont see Avalanche in the future, we can only imagine the cost savings to a large company like Microsoft to use peer to peer as a means of distribution of their products or updates.
Those interested can check out the research paper here. It's in PDF form, highly technical and some 11 pages long.
Source: Web Pro News
