Client-server model is a distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate over a computer network on separate hardware, but both client and server may reside in the same system. A server host runs one or more server programs, which share their resources with clients. A client usually does not share any of its resources, but it requests content or service from a server. Clients, therefore, initiate communication sessions with servers, which await incoming requests. Examples of computer applications that use the client-server model are email, network printing, and the World Wide Web.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.
In computer science, a trie, also called digital tree or prefix tree, is a type of k-ary search tree, a tree data structure used for locating specific keys from within a set. These keys are most often strings, with links between nodes defined not by the entire key, but by individual characters. In order to access a key, the trie is traversed depth-first, following the links between nodes, which represent each character in the key.
In computing, load balancing refers to the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources, with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle.
A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table: key-value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.
Kademlia is a distributed hash table for decentralized peer-to-peer computer networks designed by Petar Maymounkov and David Mazières in 2002. It specifies the structure of the network and the exchange of information through node lookups. Kademlia nodes communicate among themselves using UDP. A virtual or overlay network is formed by the participant nodes. Each node is identified by a number or node ID. The node ID serves not only as identification, but the Kademlia algorithm uses the node ID to locate values. In fact, the node ID provides a direct map to file hashes and that node stores information on where to obtain the file or resource.
In computer science, consistent hashing is a special kind of hashing technique such that when a hash table is resized, only keys need to be remapped on average where is the number of keys and is the number of slots. In contrast, in most traditional hash tables, a change in the number of array slots causes nearly all keys to be remapped because the mapping between the keys and the slots is defined by a modular operation.
In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every "leaf" (node) is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every node that is not a leaf is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. A hash tree allows efficient and secure verification of the contents of a large data structure. A hash tree is a generalization of a hash list and a hash chain.
Replication in computing involves sharing information so as to ensure consistency between redundant resources, such as software or hardware components, to improve reliability, fault-tolerance, or accessibility.
BitVault is a content-addressable distributed storage system, developed by Microsoft Research in China. BitVault uses peer-to-peer technology to distribute the tasks of storing and managing data. As such, there is no central authority responsible for management of the system. Rather, it is self-managing, provides high availability, reliability and scales up in a self-organizing manner, with low administrative overhead, which is almost constant irrespective of the size of the distributed overlay network.
Pastry is an overlay network and routing network for the implementation of a distributed hash table (DHT) similar to Chord. The key–value pairs are stored in a redundant peer-to-peer network of connected Internet hosts. The protocol is bootstrapped by supplying it with the IP address of a peer already in the network and from then on via the routing table which is dynamically built and repaired. It is claimed that because of its redundant and decentralized nature there is no single point of failure and any single node can leave the network at any time without warning and with little or no chance of data loss. The protocol is also capable of using a routing metric supplied by an outside program, such as ping or traceroute, to determine the best routes to store in its routing table.
Tapestry is a peer-to-peer overlay network which provides a distributed hash table, routing, and multicasting infrastructure for distributed applications. The Tapestry peer-to-peer system offers efficient, scalable, self-repairing, location-aware routing to nearby resources.
Objectivity/DB is a commercial object database produced by Objectivity, Inc. It allows applications to make standard C++, C#, Java, or Python objects persistent without having to convert the data objects into the rows and columns used by a relational database management system (RDBMS). Objectivity/DB supports the most popular object oriented languages plus SQL/ODBC and XML. It runs on Linux, Macintosh, UNIX and Windows platforms. All of the languages and platforms interoperate, with the Objectivity/DB kernel taking care of compiler and hardware platform differences.
A prefix hash tree (PHT) is a distributed data structure that enables more sophisticated queries over a distributed hash table (DHT). The prefix hash tree uses the lookup interface of a DHT to construct a trie-based data structure that is both efficient, and resilient.
Magma is a distributed file system based on a distributed hash table, written in C, compatible with Linux and BSD kernels using FUSE.
TomP2P is a distributed hash table which provides a decentralized key-value infrastructure for distributed applications. Each peer has a table that can be configured either to be disk-based or memory-based to store its values.
A data grid is an architecture or set of services that gives individuals or groups of users the ability to access, modify and transfer extremely large amounts of geographically distributed data for research purposes. Data grids make this possible through a host of middleware applications and services that pull together data and resources from multiple administrative domains and then present it to users upon request. The data in a data grid can be located at a single site or multiple sites where each site can be its own administrative domain governed by a set of security restrictions as to who may access the data. Likewise, multiple replicas of the data may be distributed throughout the grid outside their original administrative domain and the security restrictions placed on the original data for who may access it must be equally applied to the replicas. Specifically developed data grid middleware is what handles the integration between users and the data they request by controlling access while making it available as efficiently as possible. The adjacent diagram depicts a high level view of a data grid.
Oracle NoSQL Database (ONDB) is a NoSQL-type distributed key-value database from Oracle Corporation. It provides transactional semantics for data manipulation, horizontal scalability, and simple administration and monitoring.
A distributed file system for cloud is a file system that allows many clients to have access to data and supports operations on that data. Each data file may be partitioned into several parts called chunks. Each chunk may be stored on different remote machines, facilitating the parallel execution of applications. Typically, data is stored in files in a hierarchical tree, where the nodes represent directories. There are several ways to share files in a distributed architecture: each solution must be suitable for a certain type of application, depending on how complex the application is. Meanwhile, the security of the system must be ensured. Confidentiality, availability and integrity are the main keys for a secure system.
Elliptics is a distributed key-value data storage with open source code. By default it is a classic distributed hash table (DHT) with multiple replicas put in different groups. Elliptics was created to meet requirements of multi-datacenter and physically distributed storage locations when storing huge amount of medium and large files.
