Re: BitTorrent for input file staging on clusters?

"Nathan Edwards" <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.network.bit-torrent.general
Message-ID <[email protected]>

--- In [email protected], Jesus Cea <jcea@a...> wrote:
> Nathan Edwards wrote:
> > 
> > Hi, I'm playing with BitTorrent as a method for staging large input
> > files to each node of a compute cluster prior to running a distributed
> > job. 
> 
> If you are in a LAN, I rather suggest using a multicast distribution 
> procedure.

Writing a full on MPI application (or similar) just for file staging
feels like overkill for this problem.

In fact, isn't BT just a dynamic topology multicast? Consider any
chunk of the file. A node only requests it from someone if they don't
have it,  and doesn't forward it until it has it, and only to those
who don't already have it. The path defined by any single chunk must
therefore be a tree. That each chunk's tree is (potentially) different
and that the chunks arrive in an arbitrary order and via different
paths give a measure of fault tolerance and load balancing. 

Am I missing something?

Cheers!

nathan





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