EDOS P2P Content Dissemination System

The goal of this work package is to investigate scalable and secure solutions to improving the process of distributing data (source code, binaries, documentation and meta-data) to end-users. The key issue in the code distribution process is the ability to transfer a large sized code base to a large number of people. In the case of Mandriva, for instance, this entails copying a code base of 20 Gigabytes to a community containing up to 4 million users (i.e., the number of installed versions of Mandriva). This community is growing so the problems have to be addressed. Currently the process is quite slow, as it takes 48 hours to copy from a master server to all mirror servers. This creates a latency problem that leads to inconsistencies at the user and developer side. This in turn can create awkward dependencies at the module level in future releases. This work package will test and evaluate two alternative architectures for data distribution that address the issue of latency and consistency.