Beyond Music Sharing: An Evaluation of Peer-to-Peer Data Dissemination Techniques in Large Scientific Collaborations

Abstract

The avalanche of data from scientific instruments and the ensuing interest from geographically distributed users to analyze and interpret it accentuates the need for efficient data dissemination. A suitable data distribution scheme will find the delicate balance between conflicting requirements of minimizing transfer times, minimizing the impact on the network, and uniformly distributing load among participants. We identify several data distribution techniques, some successfully employed by today's peer-to-peer networks: staging, data partitioning, orthogonal bandwidth exploitation, and combinations of the above.We use simulations to explore the performance of these techniques in contexts similar to those used by today's data-centric scientific collaborations and derive several recommendations for efficient data dissemination. Our experimental results show that the peer-to-peer solutions that offer load balancing and good fault tolerance properties and have embedded participation incentives lead to unjustified costs in today's scientific data collaborations deployed on over-provisioned network cores. However, as user communities grow and these deployments scale, peer-to-peer data delivery mechanisms will likely outperform other techniques.

Selection Advantage Pattern of International Sci-Tech Cooperation and Empirical Analysis

“…In theory circle, researchers worldwide have attached importance to and conducted extensive study on the cosmopolitan subject of international science and technology cooperation. The topics conducted abroad included: the basic theories of international science and technology cooperation, such as theory of interdependency, theory of balanced growth, growth pole theory, factor endowment theory, comparative advantage theory, technology transfer theory, grad process theory, theory of monopoly advantage and so on; statistical analysis and empirical research of international science and technology cooperation status [2,3]; studies on form and policy of international science and technology cooperation [4]; impacts of international science and technology cooperation on academic institutions' performance [5]; R & D and technology cooperation among international enterprises [6]; the cooperative environment problem during the process of international science and technology cooperation [7,8].…”