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It is. It's a common misconception that peer-to-peer is only about making the handshake symmetrical. Equal contribution of resources is the important thing. In the case of most peer-to-peer technologies, this contribution is in bandwidth, storage space, and tiny routing computations. In the case of seti@home, the contribution was cpu cycles.

http://www.amazon.com/Peer-Peer-Harnessing-Disruptive-Techno... has a chapter on Seti@Home.

For those not already running it, please install folding@home on your desktop computers. http://folding.stanford.edu/




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_2_peer

Look at the 2 images on the right :) Seti@Home nodes connect only to the main server. They never see or hear anything about other nodes either. If the servers died the network would die.

But I second the Folding@Home prompting - a great cause!


Hate to be nitpicky, but for something to be peer-to-peer, I'd imagine peers have to be talking to peers... no such thing on Seti@Home :-/




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