Exercise 4

A P2P system is a network of clients sharing some of their processing power, network bandwidth and disk space directly with their peers, which totally cuts out any go-between servers. Thus peers become both the suppliers and the consumers of the resources. The most common of these P2P networks today comes in the form of BitTorrent. While using bittorrent a tracker is downloaded with information such as a checksum, file size and tracker. Ther bittorrent client is used to make the connections and download the files, piece by piece. The pieces of the file that you have already been downloaded are uploaded to other users that need them. In order for peers to be able to download files from others they must be uploading what they have already received. The tracker constantly updates the list of peers and seeds that are connected.

Client/Server architecture is most commonly used throughout the internet and within business networks. Everytime you type in a web address and connect to a website, you are the client and the website is the server. In the client/server architecture server's hold the bulk of the data and the clients access the server to retreive or manipulate that data. In some cases servers run applications aswell as store the data. This is typical of a ThinClient setup, where the desktop has little processing power and hard disk space or memory. All of the processing is performed on a central server.